Euripides and the Politics of Form

Euripides and the Politics of Form
Author: Victoria Wohl
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0691202370

How can we make sense of the innovative structure of Euripidean drama? And what political role did tragedy play in the democracy of classical Athens? These questions are usually considered to be mutually exclusive, but this book shows that they can only be properly answered together. Providing a new approach to the aesthetics and politics of Greek tragedy, Victoria Wohl argues that the poetic form of Euripides' drama constitutes a mode of political thought. Through readings of select plays, she explores the politics of Euripides' radical aesthetics, showing how formal innovation generates political passions with real-world consequences. Euripides' plays have long perplexed readers. With their disjointed plots, comic touches, and frequent happy endings, they seem to stretch the boundaries of tragedy. But the plays' formal traits—from their exorbitantly beautiful lyrics to their arousal and resolution of suspense—shape the audience's political sensibilities and ideological attachments. Engendering civic passions, the plays enact as well as express political ideas. Wohl draws out the political implications of Euripidean aesthetics by exploring such topics as narrative and ideological desire, the politics of pathos, realism and its utopian possibilities, the logic of political allegory, and tragedy's relation to its historical moment. Breaking through the impasse between formalist and historicist interpretations of Greek tragedy, Euripides and the Politics of Form demonstrates that aesthetic structure and political meaning are mutually implicated—and that to read the plays poetically is necessarily to read them politically.

The Politics of Form in Greek Literature

The Politics of Form in Greek Literature
Author: Phiroze Vasunia
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021
Genre: Greek literature
ISBN: 9781350162662

"The Politics of Form in Greek Literature explores the relationship between form and political life specifically in Greek textual culture. In the last generation or so, classicists (and their counterparts in other disciplines) have begun to pay greater attention to the socio-historical contexts of literary production and sought to historicize aesthetic practice. However, historicism (and in particular New Historicism) is only one mode of approaching the question of form, which is increasingly brought into dialogue with a number of other issues (e.g. gender). Bringing together contributions from a range of experts, this volume examines these and other related approaches, assessing their limitations and discussing possibilities for the future. Individual chapters discuss an array of ancient authors, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Callimachus, and more, and sketch out the specifically Greek contribution to the debate, as well as the implications for other disciplines. What emerges from this book are new ways of thinking about form, and indeed about politics, that will be of value to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences."--

Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays

Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays
Author: Daniel Mendelsohn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2002-10-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191530409

This book is the first book-length study of Euripides' so-called 'political plays (Children of Herakles and Suppliant Women) to appear in half a century. Still disdained as the anomalously patriotic or propagandistic works of a playwright elsewhere famous for his subversive, ironic artistic ethos, the two works in question, notorious for their uncomfortable juxtaposition of political speeches and scenes of extreme feminine emotion, continue to be dismissed by scholars of tragedy as artistic failures unworthy of the author of Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae. The present study makes use of recent insights into classical Greek conceptions of gender (in real life and on stage) and Athenian notions of civic identity to demonstrate that the political plays are, in fact, intellectually subtle and structurally coherent exercises in political theorizing - works that use complex interactions between female and male characters to explore the advantages, and costs, of being a member of the polis.

Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays

Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays
Author: Daniel Adam Mendelsohn
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780199278046

Daniel Mendelsohn makes use of insights into classical Greek conceptions of gender and Athenian notions of civic identity to demonstrate that the plays 'Children of Herakles' and 'Suppliant Women' by Euripides are subtle and coherent exercises in political theorizing.

Medea and Other Plays

Medea and Other Plays
Author: Euripides
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2003-03-27
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0141920564

Alcestis/Medea/The Children of Heracles/Hippolytus 'One of the best prose translations of Euripides I have seen' Robert Fagles This selection of plays shows Euripides transforming the titanic figures of Greek myths into recognizable, fallible human beings. Medea, in which a spurned woman takes revenge upon her lover by killing her children, is one of the most shocking of all the Greek tragedies. Medea is a towering figure who demonstrates Euripides' unusual willingness to give voice to a woman's case. Alcestis is based on a magical myth in which Death is overcome, and The Children of Heracles examines conflict between might and right, while Hippolytus deals with self-destructive integrity. Translated by JOHN DAVIE

Queer Euripides

Queer Euripides
Author: Sarah Olsen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2022-04-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350249637

This volume is the first attempt to reconsider the entire corpus of an ancient canonical author through the lens of queerness broadly conceived, taking as its subject Euripides, the latest of the three great Athenian tragedians. Although Euripides' plays have long been seen as a valuable source for understanding the construction of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece, scholars of Greek tragedy have only recently begun to engage with queer theory and its ongoing developments. Queer Euripides represents a vital step in exploring the productive perspectives on classical literature afforded by the critical study of orientations, identities, affects and experiences that unsettle not only prescriptive understandings of gender and sexuality, but also normative social structures and relations more broadly. Bringing together twenty-one chapters by experts in classical studies, English literature, performance and critical theory, this carefully curated collection of incisive and provocative readings of each surviving play draws upon queer models of temporality, subjectivity, feeling, relationality and poetic form to consider "queerness" both as and beyond sexuality. Rather than adhering to a single school of thought, these close readings showcase the multiple ways in which queer theory opens up new vantage points on the politics, aesthetics and performative force of Euripidean drama. They further demonstrate how the analytical frameworks developed by queer theorists in the last thirty years deeply resonate with the ways in which Euripides' plays twist poetic form in order to challenge well-established modes of the social. By establishing how Greek tragedy can itself be a resource for theorizing queerness, the book sets the stage for a new model of engaging with ancient literature, which challenges current interpretive methods, explores experimental paradigms, and reconceptualizes the practice of reading to place it firmly at the center of the interpretive act.

Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians

Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians
Author: Justina Gregory
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1997-07-28
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780472084432

DIVThe author reveals the complex political and social elements of Euripides' plays and the interplay between the poet and his audience. /div

Ten Plays by Euripides

Ten Plays by Euripides
Author: Euripides
Publisher: Bantam Classics
Total Pages: 433
Release: 1990-08-01
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0553213636

The first playwright of democracy, Euripides wrote with enduring insight and biting satire about social and political problems of Athenian life. In contrast to his contemporaries, he brought an exciting--and, to the Greeks, a stunning--realism to the "pure and noble form" of tragedy. For the first time in history, heroes and heroines on the stage were not idealized: as Sophocles himself said, Euripides shows people not as they ought to be, but as they actually are.