Includes bibliographical references (pages 256-268) and indexes
Cover; Half-title; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Acknowledgements; Note on translations; Introduction; CHAPTER 1 Poetry, passions and knowledge; CHAPTER 2 Staging Thyestes; CHAPTER 3 A craftier Tereus; CHAPTER 4 Atreus rex; CHAPTER 5 Fata se vertunt retro; CHAPTER 6 The poetics of passions; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index of passages cited; General index
This book subjects the most accomplished of Seneca's tragedies to a sustained critical analysis and argues for its central importance in post-Classical aesthetics. It also discusses several other of his plays, thereby offering a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the main themes and stylistic features of his tragedies
Although the myth of Atreus' gruesome vengeance on his brother, Thyestes, was embedded in Greek and Roman culture long before his time, Seneca's play is the only literary or dramatic account to have survived intact. Written probably in late Neronian...
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Although the myth of Atreus' gruesome vengeance on his brother, Thyestes, was embedded in Greek and Roman culture long before his time, Seneca's play is the only literary or dramatic account to have survived intact. Written probably in late Neronian Rome, Thyestes is now widely regarded as one of the tragedian's finest achievements and represents Seneca's most mature reflections on power and civilization and on the tragic theatre itself. The play's impact on European literature and drama from antiquity to the present has been considerable; now much studied in universities and colleges, and regularly adapted and performed, it still contains much that speaks pointedly to our times: its focus on appetite, lust, violence, and horror; its preoccupation with rhetoric, morality, and power; its concern with the problematics of kinship, and with political, social, and religious institutions and their fragility and impotence; its dramatization of reason's failure, the triumph and cyclicity of evil, the determinism of history, the mastery of the world through mastery of the word; its theatricalized and godless universe--Amazon
