The Politics of Greek Tragedy

Bibliographic Data

ID20031773
AuthorsD M Carter (0009-0007-7146-8945, corresponding author)
Year2008
Pages209
Publication date2008-07-23
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenuePolitics Of Greek Tragedy (Bristol Phoenix Press - Greece and Rome Live) (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherLiverpool University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.5949/liverpool/9781904675501.001.0001
OpenAlexW365478505
Open LibraryOL12291612M
ISBN9781904675501
LanguageEN
Citations received43

This book demonstrates how Greek tragedy can be called a political art form and why this is an exciting idea both for modern scholarship and to modern theatre producers and audiences. The central argument is that Greek tragedy made itself politically relevant to the members of the Greek city-state (polis) generally, rather than to Athenian democracy narrowly. The book begins by explaining the historical and theatrical context of first performance and then proceeds (in chapter 2) through a critical analysis of modern scholarly approaches to tragic politics. Chapter 3 gives a working definition of ‘political’ as ‘a concern with human beings as part of the community of the polis’ and shows how these concerns are manifest in the very shape (staging, performance) of tragedy. Chapter 4 discusses four political plays and identifies political issues that would have mattered to their original audience. Chapter 5 considers two of these four plays in modern performance and draws conclusions from the different political readings thus yielded: modern political theatre has often been counter-cultural; ancient Greek tragedy, for all that it posed awkward questions relevant to the life of the polis, was part of the establishment

Aesthetics · Ancient Greek · Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Context (archaeology) · Democracy · Greek tragedy · Literature · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Tragedy (event) · Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies · History · Law · Ancient (Classical) Greek · Ancient and Classical · Criticism · Greek drama · Greek drama (Tragedy) · Greek drama, history and criticism · Greek literature · History and criticism · Literary Criticism · Literature - Classics · Plays & playwrights: classical, early & medieval · Politics in literature · Tragedy (Drama)