Tragic Failures

Tragic Failures
Author: Evina Sistakou
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2016-07-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110482320

This is the first study considering the reception of Greek tragedy and the transformation of the tragic idea in Hellenistic poetry. The focus is on third-century Alexandria, where the Ptolemies fostered tragedy as a theatrical form for public entertainment and as an official genre cultivated by the Pleiad, whereas the scholars of the Museum were commissioned to edit and comment on the classical tragic texts. More importantly, the notion of the tragic was adapted to the literary trends of the era. Released from the strict rules established by Aristotle about what makes a good tragedy, the major poets of the Alexandrian avant-garde struggled to transform the tragic idea and integrate it into non-dramatic genres. Tragic Failures traces the incorporation of the tragic idea in the poetry of Callimachus and Theocritus, in Apollonius’ epic Argonautica, in the iambic Alexandra, in late Hellenistic poetry and in Parthenius’ Erotika Pathemata. It offers a fascinating insight into the new conception of the tragic dilemmas in the context of Alexandrian aesthetics.

Idylls

Idylls
Author: Theocritus
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780198152903

This is a new annotated translation of the Greek poems of Theocritus of Syracuse (first half of the third century BC), the inventor of "bucolic" or "pastoral" poetry, the principal model for Virgil in the Eclogues, and hence a major figure in the literary traditions that antiquity bequeathed to Western literature.

The Critical Idyll

The Critical Idyll
Author: Peter Morgan
Publisher: Peter Morgan
Total Pages: 194
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0938100858

The Critical Idyll is a socio-literary re-evaluation of Goethe’s idyllic verse epic, Hermann und Dorothea. The revival of traditional German values as markers of national identity against the approaching revolutionary armies of the French in the early 1790s is analysed in the main figure, the archetypal German youth, Hermann. Confronted by the misery of German refugees from the left-bank territories in 1796, Hermann becomes the spokesman for a new sense of German identity. The refugee Dorothea, and her first finance, the German Jacobin who died in Paris, provide a perspective on the themes of German identity and individual freedom at this time. The national feelings Hermann expresses are based on a language and community in the German small town, rather than on earlier territorial or dynastic concepts of the German nation. The traditional literary form of the idyll is reformed through irony and parody into a modern, critical and self-reflexive work in which central themes of post-revolutionary society are foregrounded.

Laokoon

Laokoon
Author: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Publisher:
Total Pages: 648
Release: 1910
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN:

A Colonial Tramp

A Colonial Tramp
Author: Hume Nisbet
Publisher: London : Ward & Downey
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1891
Genre: Australia
ISBN:

Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel

Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel
Author: Jean Alvares
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 100045651X

This book explores the areas in which novels such as Chariton’s Callirhoe and Heliodorus’s Aithiopika are ideal beyond the ideal love relationship and considers how concepts of the ideal connect to archetypal and literary patterns as well as reflecting contemporary ideological and cultural elements. Readers will gain a better understanding of how necessary is an understanding of these ideal elements to a full understanding of the novels’ possible readings and their reader’s attitudes. This book sets forth critical methods, subsequently followed, which allows for this exploration of ideal themes. Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel will be an invaluable resource for scholars of these novels, as well as ancient narratives and classical literature more generally. Scholars of cultural and utopian studies will also find the book useful, as well as some undergraduate students in all these areas.

Nietzsche, Wagner, Europe

Nietzsche, Wagner, Europe
Author: Martine Prange
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2013-08-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3110315238

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) supported the unification of Europe and reflected on this like few other philosophers before or after him. Many of his works are concerned with the present state and future of European culture and humanity. Resisting the “nationalist nonsense” and “politics of dissolution” of his day, he advocated the birth of “good Europeans,” i.e. “supra-national” individuals and the “amalgamation of nations.” Nietzsche, Wagner, Europe analyzes the development of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideal of European culture based on his musical aesthetics. It does so against the background of contemporary searches for a wider, cultural meaning beyond Europe’s economic-political union. The book claims that Nietzsche always propagated the “aestheticization” of Europe, but that his view on how to achieve this changed as a result of his dramatically altering philosophy of music. The main focus is on Nietzsche’s passion for and later aversion to Wagner’s music, and, in direct connection with this, his surprising embrace of Italian operas as new forms of “Dionysian” music and of Goethe as a model of “Good Europeanism.”