Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Voltaire

Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-90-04-46701-9
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 451, 374 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 772 g

Reihe: Faux Titre

Are we free agents? This perennial question is addressed by tragedy when it dramatizes the struggle of individuals with supernatural forces, or maps the inner conflict of a mind divided against itself.

The first part of this book follows the adaptations of four myths as they migrate from classical Greek tragedy to Seneca and on to seventeenth-century France: the stories of Agamemnon, Oedipus, Medea, and Phaedra. Detailed linguistic analysis charts the playwrights’ contrasting assumptions about agency and autonomy. In the second part, six plays by Corneille and Racine are discussed to show how the problem of agency and free will is explored in scenarios which show protagonists who are in thrall to their past, to their rulers, or to their own ideals.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hammond, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface

Glossary of Principal Greek Terms

Abbreviations

part 1: Modes of Tragic Agency

1 Preliminary

2 Greek Tragedy

3 Senecan Tragedy

4 French Tragedy

part 2: Metamorphoses of Tragic Myth

5 Agamemnon

1 Aeschylus

2 Seneca

3 Boyer

6 Oedipus

1 Sophocles

2 Seneca

3 Corneille

4 Voltaire

5 Folard

6 La Motte

7 Medea

1 Euripides

2 Seneca

3 Corneille

8 Phaedra

1 Euripides

2 Seneca

3 Racine

part 3: Models of Freedom and Bondage

9 Preliminary

Neo-classical Agency and Its Constraints

10 Corneille: Cinna

Discerning Liberty and Tyranny

11 Corneille: Sertorius

Nominalism and Liberty in the Empire of Words

12 Corneille: Tite et Bérénice

Tragic Freedom

13 Racine: Andromaque

The Bondage of Time

14 Racine: Britannicus

Forms of Liberty and Servitude

15 Racine: Bérénice

The Rhetoric of Space and Self

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Paul Hammond (LittD, Cambridge, 1996) is Professor of Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include The Strangeness of Tragedy (2009) and The Poems of John Dryden, 5 vols, co-edited with David Hopkins (1995-2005).