Where is the pleasure in tragedy? This question, how suffering and sorrow become the stuff of aesthetic delight, is at the center of Charles Segal's new book, which collects and expands his recent explorations of Euripides' art. Alcestis,...
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Where is the pleasure in tragedy? This question, how suffering and sorrow become the stuff of aesthetic delight, is at the center of Charles Segal's new book, which collects and expands his recent explorations of Euripides' art. Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba, the three early plays interpreted here, are linked by common themes of violence, death, lamentation and mourning, and by their implicit definitions of male and female roles. Segal shows how these plays draw on ancient traditions of poetic and ritual commemoration, particularly epic song, and at the same time refashion these traditions
Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-301) and index
Electronic reproduction; Available via World Wide Web
Contents; Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Euripides' Muse of Sorrows and the Artifice of Tragic Pleasure; Alcestis; 3. Cold Delight: Art, Death, and Transgression of Genre; 4. Female Death and Male Tears; 5. Admetus' Divided House: Spatial Dichotomies and Gender Roles; Hippolytus; 6. Language, Signs, and Gender; 7. Theater, Ritual, and Commemoration; 8. Confusion and Concealment: Vision, Hope, and Tragic Knowledge; Hecuba; 9. Golden Armor and Servile Robes: Heroism and Metamorphosis; 10. Violence and the Other: Greek, Female, and Barbarian; 11. Law and Universals; 12. The Problem of the Gods
13. Conclusion: Euripides' Songs of SorrowNotes; Bibliography; Index
