Tragedy Offstage

Author : Rachel Hall Sternberg
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 029277348X
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tragedy Offstage written by Rachel Hall Sternberg and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humane ideals were central to the image Athenians had of themselves and their city during the classical period. Tragic plays, which formed a part of civic education, often promoted pity and compassion. But it is less clear to what extent Athenians embraced such ideals in daily life. How were they expected to respond, emotionally and pragmatically, to the suffering of other people? Under what circumstances? At what risk to themselves? In this book, Rachel Hall Sternberg draws on evidence from Greek oratory and historiography of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE to study the moral universe of the ancient Athenians: how citizens may have treated one another in times of adversity, when and how they were expected to help. She develops case studies in five spheres of everyday life: home nursing, the ransom of captives, intervention in street crimes, the long-distance transport of sick and wounded soldiers, and slave torture. Her close reading of selected narratives suggests that Athenians embraced high standards for helping behavior—at least toward relatives, friends, and some fellow citizens. Meanwhile, a subtle discourse of moral obligation strengthened the bonds that held Athenian society together, encouraging individuals to bring their personal behavior into line with the ideals of the city-state.

Author : Helene P. Foley
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520283872
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage written by Helene P. Foley and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-06-26 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the emergence of Greek tragedy on the American stage from the nineteenth century to the present. Despite the gap separating the world of classical Greece from our own, Greek tragedy has provided a fertile source for some of the most innovative American theater. Helene P. Foley shows how plays like Oedipus Rex and Medea have resonated deeply with contemporary concerns and controversies—over war, slavery, race, the status of women, religion, identity, and immigration. Although Greek tragedy was often initially embraced for its melodramatic possibilities, by the twentieth century it became a vehicle not only for major developments in the history of American theater and dance but also for exploring critical tensions in American cultural and political life. Drawing on a wide range of sources—archival, video, interviews, and reviews—Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage provides the most comprehensive treatment of the subject available.

Author : Matthew C. Farmer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190492074
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tragedy on the Comic Stage written by Matthew C. Farmer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristophanes' engagement with tragedy is one of the most striking features of his comedies. Tragedy on the Comic Stage contextualizes this engagement with tragedy within Greek comedy as a genre by examining paratragedy in the fragments of Aristophanes' contemporaries and successors in the fifth and fourth centuries.

Author : Michelle M. Dowd
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316300749
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage written by Michelle M. Dowd and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern England's system of patrilineal inheritance, in which the eldest son inherited his father's estate and title, was one of the most significant forces affecting social order in the period. Demonstrating that early modern theatre played a unique and vital role in shaping how inheritance was understood, Michelle M. Dowd explores some of the common contingencies that troubled this system: marriage and remarriage, misbehaving male heirs, and families with only daughters. Shakespearean drama helped question and reimagine inheritance practices, making room for new formulations of gendered authority, family structure, and wealth transfer. Through close readings of canonical and non-canonical plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, and others, Dowd pays particular attention to the significance of space in early modern inheritance and the historical relationship between dramatic form and the patrilineal economy. Her book will interest researchers and students of early modern drama, Shakespeare, gender studies, and socio-economic history.

Author : Mario Erasmo
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292782136
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Roman Tragedy written by Mario Erasmo and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roman tragedies were written for over three hundred years, but only fragments remain of plays that predate the works of Seneca in the mid-first century C.E., making it difficult to define the role of tragedy in ancient Roman culture. Nevertheless, in this pioneering book, Mario Erasmo draws on all the available evidence to trace the evolution of Roman tragedy from the earliest tragedians to the dramatist Seneca and to explore the role played by Roman culture in shaping the perception of theatricality on and off the stage. Performing a philological analysis of texts informed by semiotic theory and audience reception, Erasmo pursues two main questions in this study: how does Roman tragedy become metatragedy, and how did off-stage theatricality come to compete with the theatre? Working chronologically, he looks at how plays began to incorporate a rhetoricized reality on stage, thus pointing to their own theatricality. And he shows how this theatricality, in turn, came to permeate society, so that real events such as the assassination of Julius Caesar took on theatrical overtones, while Pompey's theatre opening and the lavish spectacles of the emperor Nero deliberately blurred the lines between reality and theatre. Tragedy eventually declined as a force in Roman culture, Erasmo suggests, because off-stage reality became so theatrical that on-stage tragedy could no longer compete.

Author : Dan Curley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107009537
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tragedy in Ovid written by Dan Curley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive study establishes the importance of an unexpected genre, tragedy, in the career of the most mercurial Western poet.

Author : Bruce R. Smith
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400859395
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500-1700 written by Bruce R. Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike the contrast between the sacred and the taboo, the opposition of "comic" and "tragic" is not a way of categorizing experience that we find in cultures all over the world or even at different periods in Western civilization. Though medieval writers and readers distinguished stories with happy endings from stories with unhappy endings, it was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--fifteen hundred years after Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus, and Terence had last been performed in the theaters of the Roman Empire--that tragedy and comedy regained their ancient importance as ways of giving dramatic coherence to human events. Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage charts that rediscovery, not in the pages of scholars' books, but on the stages of England's schools, colleges, inns of court, and royal court, and finally in the public theaters of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century London. In bringing to imaginative life the scripts, eyewitness accounts, and financial records of these productions, Bruce Smith turns to the structuralist models that anthropologists have used to explain how human beings as social creatures organize and systematize experience. He sets in place the critical, physical, and social structures in which sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Englishmen watched productions of classical comedy and classical tragedy. Seen in these three contexts, these productions play out a conflict between classical and medieval ways of understanding and experiencing comedy's interplay between satiric and romantic impulses and tragedy's clash between individuals and society. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author : Paul M. Blowers
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198854102
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Visions and Faces of the Tragic written by Paul M. Blowers and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the pervasive early Christian repudiation of pagan theatrical art, especially prior to Constantine, this monograph demonstrates the increasing attention of late-ancient Christian authors to the genre of tragedy as a basis to explore the complexities of human finitude, suffering, and mortality in relation to the wisdom, justice, and providence of God. The book argues that various Christian writers, particularly in the post-Constantinian era, were keenly devoted to the mimesis, or imaginative re-presentation, of the tragic dimension of creaturely existence more than with simply mimicking the poetics of the classical Greek and Roman tragedians. It analyses a whole array of hermeneutical, literary, and rhetorical manifestations of "tragical mimesis" in early Christian writing, which, capitalizing on the elements of tragedy already perceptible in biblical revelation, aspired to deepen and edify Christian engagement with multiform evil and with the extreme vicissitudes of historical existence. Early Christian tragical mimetics included not only interpreting (and often amplifying) the Bible's own tragedies for contemporary audiences, but also developing models of the Christian self as a tragic self, revamping the Christian moral conscience as a tragical conscience, and cultivating a distinctively Christian tragical pathos. The study culminates in an extended consideration of the theological intelligence and accountability of "tragical vision" and tragical mimesis in early Christian literary culture, and the unique role of the theological virtue of hope in its repertoire of tragical emotions.

Author : Michael Meere
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019284413X
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy written by Michael Meere and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies the representation of violence in tragedies written for the French stage during the sixteenth century, and explores its connection with issues such as politics, religion, gender, and militantism to place the plays within their historical, cultural, and theatrical contexts.

Author : Frisbee Sheffield
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191536822
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Plato's Symposium written by Frisbee Sheffield and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-07-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frisbee Sheffield argues that the Symposium has been unduly marginalized by philosophers. Although the topic - eros - and the setting at a symposium have seemed anomalous, she demonstrates that both are intimately related to Plato's preoccupation with the nature of the good life, with virtue, and how it is acquired and transmitted. For Plato, analysing our desires is a way of reflecting on the kind of people we will turn out to be and on our chances of leading a worthwhile and happy life. In its focus on the question why he considered desires to be amenable to this type of reflection, this book explores Plato's ethics of desire.