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This collection of essays is devoted to the most important changes--in theme, language, structure, style, and production--that characterize the transformation of Athenian Comedy from the mid-fifth through the fourth century.
Thirteen essays combine classical scholars' interest in theatrical production with a growing interdisciplinary inquiry into the urban contexts of literary production. At once a study of classical Greek literature and an analysis of cultural production, this collection reveals how for two centuries Athens itself was transformed, staged as comedy, and ultimately shaped by contemporary material, social, and ideological forces.
These thirteen essays combine classical scholars' interest in theatrical production with a growing interdisciplinary inquiry into the urban contexts of literary production. Taking as their departure point the annual comic competitions at the Athenian dramatic festivals, the contributors examine how the polis--as a place, a political entity, a specific social organization, and a set of ideological representations--was enacted on stage from the middle of the fifth century B.C. through the fourth. Applying a variety of critical approaches to Athenian comedy, these essays are grouped around three broad categories: utopianism, fissures in the social fabric, and the new polis of fourth-century com...
The aim of this book is to explore the definition(s) of ‘theatre’ and ‘metatheatre’ that scholars use when studying the ancient Greek world. Although in modern languages their meaning is mostly straightforward, both concepts become problematical when applied to ancient reality. In fact, ‘theatre’ as well as ‘metatheatre’ are used in many different, sometimes even contradictory, ways by modern scholars. Through a series of papers examining questions related to ancient Greek theatre and dramatic performances of various genres the use of those two terms is problematized and put into question. Must ancient Greek theatre be reduced to what was performed in proper theatre-buildings...
Spectator Politics is the first major study of metatheatre, or theatrically self-conscious performance, in Aristophanes. Using a reception-based performance criticism, Niall Slater elucidates the comic effectiveness of the earliest surviving comedies in the Western tradition. Slater demonstrates that Aristophanes employed metatheatre not simply to entertain but also to teach his audience how to read and interpret performance in other key public venues of the ancient democracy of Athens, such as performances in the political assembly and law courts. Aristophanes was, Slater contends, the first performance critic. Spectator Politics shows how Aristophanes' comedy served the Athenians by helpin...
In a grand tour of comic theater over the centuries, Erich Segal traces the evolution of the classical form from its early origins in a misogynistic quip by the sixth-century B.C. Susarion, through countless weddings and happy endings, to the exasperated monosyllables of Samuel Beckett. With fitting wit, profound erudition lightly worn, and instructive examples from the mildly amusing to the uproarious, his book fully illustrates comedy's glorious life cycle from its first breath to its death in the Theater of the Absurd.
This volume, in honour of Angus M. Bowie, collects seventeen original essays on Greek comedy. Its contributors treat questions of origin, genre and artistic expression, interpret individual plays from different angles (literary, historical, performative) and cover aspects of reception from antiquity to the 20th century. Topics that have not received much attention so far, such as the prehistory of Doric comedy or music in Old Comedy, receive a prominent place. The essays are arranged in three sections: (1) Genre, (2) Texts and Contexts, (3) Reception. Within each section the chapters are as far as possible arranged in chronological order, according to historical time or to the (putative) dat...
Aristophanes was clearly anxious about the role of the sophists and the “new” education in Athens. After the perceived failure of Clouds in 423 and its subsequent, unperformed revision, Aristophanes, this book argues, returned in 414 with Birds, a continuation and deepening of his critique found in Clouds. Peisetaerus or “persuader of his comrades,” the protagonist of Birds, though an old man, is clearly a student of Socrates’ phrontisterion. Unlike Socrates, however, he is political and ambitious and he understands the whole of human nature, both rational and irrational. Peisetaerus employs the various deconstructive techniques of Socrates and his allies (which is summed up on the...
In v.1-8 the final number consists of the Commencement annual.
Within modern frameworks of knowledge and representation, Dionysos often appears to be atypical for ancient culture, an exception within the context of ancient polytheism, or even an instance of a difference that anticipates modernism. How can recent research contribute to a more precise understanding of the diverse transformations of the ancient god, from Greek antiquity to the Roman Empire? In this volume, which is the result of an international conference held in March 2009 at the Pergamon Museum Berlin, scholars from all branches of classical studies, including history of scholarship, consider this question. Consequently, this leads to a new look on vase paintings, sanctuaries, rituals and religious-political institutions like theatre, and includes new readings of the texts of ancient poets, historians and philosophers, as well as of papyri and inscriptions. It is the diversity of sources or methods and the challenge of former views that is the strength of this volume, providing a comprehensive, innovative and richly faceted account of the “different” god in an unprecedented way.