Minor characters, genre, and relationality

This essay investigates the distinction between major and minor characters by analysing the contemporary literary reception of a minor figure from one of the most canonical works in world literature: Ismene, Antigone's sister in Sophocles's Antigone.While Sophocles's tragedy continues to elicit a startling number of rewritings and adaptations, the last two decades have seen a remarkable increase in rewritings which bring the heroine's sister Ismene, a minor character in the original play, to the forefront.This multilingual, multi-generic, world literary corpus engages with Ismene's relationship to heroism and sacrifice, moving away from tragedy and instead turning to a variety of genres: monologues, short stories, non-tragic plays, comedies, as well as hybrid forms that incorporate intermedial references.While much has been written about postcolonial and feminist rewritings of canonical Western texts, very little has been said about the attachments which secondary figures might elicit in peripheral literatures and minor authors.This focus, as this essay will show, helps refine notions of agency, solidarity, and connectivity in theories of the minor.The analysis presented here underscores the aesthetic, generic, and political implications of the revisionary representation of minor figures by

Art · Humanities · Literature · Sister · Sociology · Anthropology · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Language and cultural evolution · Philosophy

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