Review of:
Once Upon a Time in Iraq: History of a Modern Tragedy
, James Bluemel and Renad Mansour (2021)
London: BBC Books, 390 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78594-457-4, p/bk, £12.99
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.
These essays deal with the uses of Greek tragedy by European playwrights between the Renaissance and the Romantic period. While the individual essays include discussions of plays, they aim at ...isolating the strategies of adaptation and patterns of transformation shared by the different writers as heirs to a common dramatic tradition.
A new account of tragedy and its fundamental position in
Western culture In this compelling account, eminent
literary critic Terry Eagleton explores the nuances of tragedy in
Western culture-from ...literature and politics to philosophy and
theater. Eagleton covers a vast array of thinkers and
practitioners, including Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Slavoj
Žižek, as well as key figures in theater, from Sophocles and
Aeschylus to Shakespeare and Ibsen. Eagleton examines the political
nature of tragedy, looking closely at its connection with periods
of historical transition. The dramatic form originated not as a
meditation on the human condition, but at moments of political
engagement, when civilizations struggled with the conflicts that
beset them. Tragedy, Eagleton demonstrates, is fundamental to human
experience and culture.
How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, ...the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system (presocratic philosophy) and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods (in tragedy). Seaford argues that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal.
Il volume che qui vede la luce costituisce il secondo capitolo del progetto METra (Mapping Epic in Tragedy – Epica e tragedia greca: una mappatura) e contiene i contributi presentati durante il ...Seminario Internazionale METra 2, tenutosi a Verona nel giugno 2022. Proseguendo sulle direttrici di ricerca i cui esiti sono ora disponibili in METra 1 (Lexis Supplementi 11, 2022), questa seconda raccolta indaga ulteriori aspetti dell’eredità omerica ed epica in tragedia. Come nel volume precedente, i saggi propongono approcci disciplinari diversificati: dallo studio metrico, linguistico e stilistico all’intertestualità, dalla ricerca dell’allusione alla riflessione sull’eventuale persistenza, tra Grecia arcaica e classica, di sistemi culturali ed etico-religiosi, senza trascurare il dialogo con la modernità.
