The emphasis throughout this book, ideal for sixth form and early university students, is on Sophocles' tragic thinking, on the concept of the 'Sophoclean hero', and on the dramatic structure of the plays. The seven extant plays, Ajax, Women of Trachis, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus are assessed and a brief concluding chapter draws together what has been said in the seven studies. This second edition has been revised fully, with an updated further reading list and more detailed information on the chorus and staging of the plays.

The aim of the book is to help readers to understand why Sophocles is still worth reading, or going to see in the theatre, in the 21st century, and to show how far Sophoclean scholarship has moved in recent decades from the once prevalent view that he was a pious religious conformist who had nothing very profound or original to say, but who said it very beautifully.

The volume is a companion to The Plays of Euripides (by James Morwood) and The Plays of Aeschylus (by Alex Garvie) also available in second editions from Bloomsbury. A further essential guide to the themes and context of ancient Greek tragedy may be found in Laura Swift's new introductory volume, Greek Tragedy.

The writings of Greek philosopher ARISTOTLE (384BC 322BC) student of Plato, teacher of Alexander the Great are among the most influential on Western thought, and indeed upon Western civilization itself. From theology and logic to politics and even biology, there is no area of human knowledge that has not been touched by his thinking.Poetics one of Aristotle 's greatest works is the philosopher 's grand and insightful essay on art and its purposes. Why must a story have a beginning, a middle, and an end? How can we define tragedy, and what is the artistic purpose of it? Is there one ideal kind of drama? What is the nature of poetry? How consciously should poets and playwrights construct their work?All these questions, and others, are discussed and debated in this, perhaps the single most significant text in Western critical tradition. Writers, actors, students of literature, and armchair philosophers will find it a challenging and rewarding read.

As both a literary genre and a view of life, tragedy has from the very beginning spurred a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Plato famously banned tragedians from his ideal community because he believed that their representations of vicious behavior could deform minds. Aristotle set out to answer Plato's objections, arguing that fiction offers a faithful image of the truth and that it promotes emotional health through the mechanism of catharsis. Aristotle's definition of tragedy actually had its greatest impact not on Greek tragedy itself but on later Latin literature, beginning with the tragedies of the Roman poet and Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BC - AD 65). Scholarship over the last fifty years, however, has increasingly sought to identify in Seneca's prose writings a Platonic poetics which is antagonistic toward tragedy and which might therefore explain why Seneca's plays seem so often to present the failure of Stoicism. As Gregory Staley argues in this book, when Senecan tragedy fails to stage virtue we should see in this not the failure of Stoicism but a Stoic conception of tragedy as the right vehicle for imaging Seneca's familiar world of madmen and fools. Senecan tragedy enacts Aristotle's conception of the genre as a vivid image of the truth and treats tragedy as a natural venue in which to explore the human soul. Staley's reading of Seneca's plays draws on current scholarship about Stoicism as well as on the writings of Renaissance authors like Sir Philip Sidney, who borrowed from Seneca the word "idea" to designate what we would now label as a "theory" of tragedy. Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy will appeal broadly to students and scholars of classics, ancient philosophy, and English literature.

Ever since Aristotle's Poetics, both the theory and the practice of theater have been governed by the assumption that it is a form of representation dominated by what Aristotle calls the "mythos," or the "plot." This conception of theater has subordinated characteristics related to the theatrical medium, such as the process and place of staging, to the demands of a unified narrative.

This readable, thought-provoking, and multidisciplinary study explores theatrical writings that question this aesthetical-generic conception and seek instead to work with the medium of theatricality itself. Beginning with Plato, Samuel Weber tracks the uneasy relationships among theater, ethics, and philosophy through Aristotle, the major Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Freud, Benjamin, Artaud, and many others who develop alternatives to dominant narrative-aesthetic assumptions about the theatrical medium.

His readings also interrogate the relation of theatricality to the introduction of
electronic media. The result is to show that, far from breaking with the characteristics of live staged performance, the new media intensify ambivalences about place and identity already at work in theater since the Greeks.

Praise for Samuel Weber: "What kind of questioning is primarily after something other than an answer that can be measured . . . in cognitive terms? Those interested in the links between modern philosophy nd media culture will be impressed by the unusual intellectual clarity and depth with which Weber formulates the . . . questions that constiture the true challenge to cultural studies today. . . . one of our most important cultural critics and thinkers"--MLN

Transfigured Stages: Major Practitioners and Theatre Aesthetics in Australia captures the excitement of a key period in the emergence of postdramatic theatre in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. It is the first book to discuss work by The Sydney Front (1986 - 1993) and Open City (1987 - ), and engages contemporary cultural and aesthetic theory to analyse performances by these artists, as well as theatre productions by Jenny Kemp and others. These performance practitioners are considered as part of an international paradigm attesting to forms of theatre that no longer operate according to the established principles of drama. This book also highlights the complexity of Indigrenous theatre through its analysis of the Mudrooroo-Müller project staged in 1996."--Publisher.

The purpose of theater, like magic, like religion . . . is to inspire cleansing awe. What makes good drama? And why does drama matter in an age that is awash in information and entertainment? David Mamet, one of our greatest living playwrights, tackles these questions with bracing directness and aphoristic authority. He believes that the tendency to dramatize is essential to human nature, that we create drama out of everything from today’s weather to next year’s elections. But the highest expression of this drive remains the theater.
         With a cultural range that encompasses Shakespeare, Bretcht, and Ibsen, Death of a Salesman and Bad Day at Black Rock, Mamet shows us how to distinguish true drama from its false variants. He considers the impossibly difficult progression between one act and the next and the mysterious function of the soliloquy. The result, in Three Uses of the Knife, is an electrifying treatise on the playwright’s art that is also a strikingly original work of moral and aesthetic philosophy. 

Oxford University Press published eminent literary critic Leo Bersani's first book, on Proust, in 1965, but the work has long been out of print. This new edition comes in response to a recent renewal of interest among philosophers of literature, among others, and features a new preface from the author.

This is an edited collection by a distinguished team of scholars on the philosopher and poet Philodemus of Gadara (ca. 110-40 BC). The discovery of his library at Herculaneum, and the editing and gradual publication of the material, has reawakened interest in the philosophical and historical importance of his work. Philodemus presents us with a poetic theory of interest in itself, and several of his treatises provide us with instances of how poetry was seen as providing moral paradigms and guidance. These essays explore the many facets of Philodemus's work and the relationship between them, offering a critical survey of recent trends and developments in scholarship on Philodemus in particular and Hellenistic literary theory in general.

The Orpheus myth has fascinated Western culture from the sixth century B.C. to the present.

This book defines, through a survey of the European tradition of literature, art, poetry, and music, some of the philosophical and psychological implications and developments of that myth. A number of the main expressions of the Orpheus tradition are considered in detail: the Ovidian romances of the Middle Ages, the tragic love story of Renaissance opera (but not of The Magic Flute), and, in the earlier tradition of Orpheus as savior or shaman, the poem known as "The Testament of Orpheus" and catacomb iconography equating Orpheus with Christ.

Comparison of the different treatments of the Orpheus legend by poets and artists in the Greco-Roman world shows a number of wide-ranging and often conflicting developments from the early story of the divinely inspired poet-musician. Orpheus was believed to have aroused responses from inanimate nature as well as from living creatures, bringing about a peaceful order and even—in rare cases—restoring the dead to life.

As the supreme poet-musician of Greek tradition, the figure of Orpheus embodies the most central and persistent elements in Greek ideas of poetry, music, and artistic creativity. His journey to Hades has led him to become, for some, a Christ figure; for others, he descended into the unconscious and received awareness of timeless truths and creative power; through the Orphic cult his followers tried to attain some kind of eternal life; the loss of his bride Eurydice and his eventual dismemberment likewise provide material rich for the anthropologist, psychologist, and artist.