Tragic Rites
Narrative and Ritual in Sophoclean Drama
Adriana E. Brook

Wisconsin Studies in Classics
Laura McClure, Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell, and Matthew Roller, Series Editors

Illuminates Greek tragedy and ancient theater

Presenting an innovative new reading of Sophocles' plays, Tragic Rites analyzes the poetic and narrative function of ritual in the seven extant plays of Sophocles. Adriana Brook closely examines four of them—Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus—in the context of her wide-ranging consideration of the entire Sophoclean corpus. Exploring the playwright's dramatic technique, she shows how he used elements of ritual to guide the perceptions and expectations of his fifth-century audience about plot and character.

Employing both modern ritual theory and Aristotle's Poetics, Brook exposes the deep structural analogies between ritual and narrative, the parallels between mistakes in ritual and deviations from the expected in the plot, and the relationship between ritual content and dramatic closure.

 

 

Of Related Interest
Oedipus Rex Sophocles, A verse translation by David Mulroy	Antigone Sophocles, A verse translation by David Mulroy	Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles, A verse translation by David Mulroy

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January, 2018
LC: 2017016852 PA
240 pp. 6 x 9

	Cloth $99.95 s ISBN 978-0-299-31380-7
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