Download or read book Female Acts in Greek Tragedy written by Helene P. Foley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Classical Athenian ideology did not permit women to exercise legal, economic, and social autonomy, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often represent them as influential social and moral forces in their own right. Scholars have struggled to explain this seeming contradiction. Helene Foley shows how Greek tragedy uses gender relations to explore specific issues in the development of the social, political, and intellectual life in the polis. She investigates three central and problematic areas in which tragic heroines act independently of men: death ritual and lamentation, marriage, and the making of significant ethical choices. Her anthropological approach, together with her literary analysis, allows for an unusually rich context in which to understand gender relations in ancient Greece. This book examines, for example, the tragic response to legislation regulating family life that may have begun as early as the sixth century. It also draws upon contemporary studies of virtue ethics and upon feminist reconsiderations of the Western ethical tradition. Foley maintains that by viewing public issues through the lens of the family, tragedy asks whether public and private morality can operate on the same terms. Moreover, the plays use women to represent significant moral alternatives. Tragedy thus exploits, reinforces, and questions cultural clichés about women and gender in a fashion that resonates with contemporary Athenian social and political issues.
Download or read book Female Acts in Greek Tragedy written by Helene P. Foley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002-12-08 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although classical Athenian ideology did not permit women to exercise legal, economic or social autonomy, the tragedies often represent them as influential social and moral forces. This work studies this apparent contradiction, showing how Greek tragedy uses gender relations to explore issues.
Download or read book Female Acts in Greek Tragedy written by Helene P. Foley and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She investigates three central and problematic areas in which tragic heroines act independently of men: death ritual and lamentation, marriage, and the making of significant ethical choices. Her anthropological approach, together with her literary analysis, allows for an unusually rich context in which to understand gender relations in ancient Greece."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages written by Tanya Pollard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book argues that rediscovered ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on sixteenth-century England's dramatic landscape, not only in academic and aristocratic settings, but also at the heart of the developing commercial theaters."--Introduction, p. 2.
Download or read book Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy written by P. J. Finglass and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-08 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How were women represented in Greek tragedy? This question lies at the heart of much modern scholarship on ancient drama, yet it has typically been approached using evidence drawn only from the thirty-two tragedies that survive complete - neglecting tragic fragments, especially those recently discovered and often very substantial fragmentary papyri from plays that had been thought lost. Drawing on the latest research on both gender in tragedy and on tragic fragments, the essays in this volume examine this question from a fresh perspective, shedding light on important mythological characters such as Pasiphae, Hypsipyle, and Europa, on themes such as violence, sisterhood, vengeance, and sex, and on the methodology of a discipline which needs to take fragmentary evidence to heart in order to gain a fuller understanding of ancient tragedy. All Greek is translated to ensure wide accessibility.
Download or read book Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage written by Helene P. Foley and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-06-26 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the emergence of Greek tragedy on the American stage from the nineteenth century to the present. Despite the gap separating the world of classical Greece from our own, Greek tragedy has provided a fertile source for some of the most innovative American theater. Helene P. Foley shows how plays like Oedipus Rex and Medea have resonated deeply with contemporary concerns and controversies—over war, slavery, race, the status of women, religion, identity, and immigration. Although Greek tragedy was often initially embraced for its melodramatic possibilities, by the twentieth century it became a vehicle not only for major developments in the history of American theater and dance but also for exploring critical tensions in American cultural and political life. Drawing on a wide range of sources—archival, video, interviews, and reviews—Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage provides the most comprehensive treatment of the subject available.
Download or read book Dangerous Gifts written by Deborah Lyons and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deianeira sends her husband Herakles a poisoned robe. Eriphyle trades the life of her husband Amphiaraos for a golden necklace. Atreus’s wife Aerope gives away the token of his sovereignty, a lamb with a golden fleece, to his brother Thyestes, who has seduced her. Gifts and exchanges always involve a certain risk in any culture, but in the ancient Greek imagination, women and gifts appear to be a particularly deadly combination. This book explores the role of gender in exchange as represented in ancient Greek culture, including Homeric epic and tragedy, non-literary texts, and iconographic and historical evidence of various kinds. Using extensive insights from anthropological work on marriage, kinship, and exchange, as well as ethnographic parallels from other traditional societies, Deborah Lyons probes the gendered division of labor among both gods and mortals, the role of marriage (and its failure) in transforming women from objects to agents of exchange, the equivocal nature of women as exchange-partners, and the importance of the sister-brother bond in understanding the economic and social place of women in ancient Greece. Her findings not only enlarge our understanding of social attitudes and practices in Greek antiquity but also demonstrate the applicability of ethnographic techniques and anthropological theory to the study of ancient societies.
Download or read book The Captive Woman s Lament in Greek Tragedy written by Casey Dué and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The laments of captive women found in extant Athenian tragedy constitute a fundamentally subversive aspect of Greek drama. In performances supported by and intended for the male citizens of Athens, the songs of the captive women at the Dionysia gave a voice to classes who otherwise would have been marginalized and silenced in Athenian society: women, foreigners, and the enslaved. The Captive Woman's Lament in Greek Tragedy addresses the possible meanings ancient audiences might have attached to these songs. Casey Dué challenges long-held assumptions about the opposition between Greeks and barbarians in Greek thought by suggesting that, in viewing the plight of the captive women, Athenian audiences extended pity to those least like themselves. Dué asserts that tragic playwrights often used the lament to create an empathetic link that blurred the line between Greek and barbarian. After a brief overview of the role of lamentation in both modern and classical traditions, Dué focuses on the dramatic portrayal of women captured in the Trojan War, tracing their portrayal through time from the Homeric epics to Euripides' Athenian stage. The author shows how these laments evolved in their significance with the growth of the Athenian Empire. She concludes that while the Athenian polis may have created a merciless empire outside the theater, inside the theater they found themselves confronted by the essential similarities between themselves and those they sought to conquer.
Download or read book Playing the Other written by Froma I. Zeitlin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zeitlin explores the diversity and complexity of these interactions through the most influential literary texts of the archaic and classical periods, from epic (Homer) and didactic poetry (Hesiod) to the productions of tragedy and comedy in fifth-century Athens.
Download or read book Gender and the City in Euripides Political Plays written by Daniel Adam Mendelsohn and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Mendelsohn makes use of insights into classical Greek conceptions of gender and Athenian notions of civic identity to demonstrate that the plays 'Children of Herakles' and 'Suppliant Women' by Euripides are subtle and coherent exercises in political theorizing.
Download or read book Virginia Woolf s Greek Tragedy written by Nancy Worman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Woolf's writings Greece and Greek tragedy in particular shape an exoticized aesthetic space that both emerges from and enables critique of the cosy settings and colonialist conceits of elite (and largely male) British attitudes toward culture and politics. Rather than highlighting Woolf's exclusion from male intellectual purviews, as so many scholars have emphasized, this book urges attention on how her engagements with Greek tragedy both collude with and challenge modernist aesthetics and contemporary politics. Woolf's encounters with and uses of Greek tragedy fantasize an alternative perceptual capacity that correlates to feminine (and feminist) modes, which are depicted in her writings as alternately defiant and choral. In this scheme, Greek tragedy is something of a dreamland, the mysterious dynamics of which Woolf treats as transcending cultural attitudes that hinge upon imperialist adventuring and violence. As scholars have recognized, especially in recent decades, the exoticizing gestures central to the work of so many modernists have uncomfortable political underpinnings, since they frequently inhabit imperialist and colonialist perspectives while appearing to critique them. Unlike most scholars, Nancy Worman argues that Woolf is no exception, although the feminism and humour that inflects so many "Greek" elements in her work saves it from the worst offenses.
Download or read book Greek Tragic Style written by R. B. Rutherford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-10 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the poetic qualities of the Greek tragic dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides highlighting their similarities and differences.
Download or read book Reflections of Women in Antiquity written by Helene P. Foley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in the year 1981, Reflections of Women in Antiquity is a valuable contribution to the field of Performance.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy written by Martin Revermann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-12 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a unique panorama of this challenging area of Greek literature, combining literary perspectives with historical issues and material culture.
Download or read book Women in the Classical World written by Elaine Fantham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-03-30 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information about women is scattered throughout the fragmented mosaic of ancient history: the vivid poetry of Sappho survived antiquity on remnants of damaged papyrus; the inscription on a beautiful fourth century B.C.E. grave praises the virtues of Mnesarete, an Athenian woman who died young; a great number of Roman wives were found guilty of poisoning their husbands, but was it accidental food poisoning, or disease, or something more sinister. Apart from the legends of Cleopatra, Dido and Lucretia, and images of graceful maidens dancing on urns, the evidence about the lives of women of the classical world--visual, archaeological, and written--has remained uncollected and uninterpreted. Now, the lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched Women in the Classical World lifts the curtain on the women of ancient Greece and Rome, exploring the lives of slaves and prostitutes, Athenian housewives, and Rome's imperial family. The first book on classical women to give equal weight to written texts and artistic representations, it brings together a great wealth of materials--poetry, vase painting, legislation, medical treatises, architecture, religious and funerary art, women's ornaments, historical epics, political speeches, even ancient coins--to present women in the historical and cultural context of their time. Written by leading experts in the fields of ancient history and art history, women's studies, and Greek and Roman literature, the book's chronological arrangement allows the changing roles of women to unfold over a thousand-year period, beginning in the eighth century B.C.E. Both the art and the literature highlight women's creativity, sexuality and coming of age, marriage and childrearing, religious and public roles, and other themes. Fascinating chapters report on the wild behavior of Spartan and Etruscan women and the mythical Amazons; the changing views of the female body presented in male-authored gynecological treatises; the "new woman" represented by the love poetry of the late Republic and Augustan Age; and the traces of upper- and lower-class life in Pompeii, miraculously preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. Provocative and surprising, Women in the Classical World is a masterly foray into the past, and a definitive statement on the lives of women in ancient Greece and Rome.
Download or read book The Homeric Hymn to Demeter written by Helene P. Foley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed in the late seventh or early sixth century B.C.E., is a key to understanding the psychological and religious world of ancient Greek women. The poem tells how Hades, lord of the underworld, abducted the goddess Persephone and how her grieving mother, Demeter, the goddess of grain, forced the gods to allow Persephone to return to her for part of each year. Helene Foley presents the Greek text and an annotated translation of this poem, together with selected essays that give the reader a rich understanding of the Hymn's structure and artistry, its role in the religious life of the ancient world, and its meaning for the modern world.
Download or read book Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion written by Tatiana Tsakiropoulou-Summers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion explores the origin and evolution of the political ideology that has kept women away from centers of political power – from the birth of democracy in ancient Athens to the modern era. In this period of 2500 years, two parallel tracks advanced: while male authority tried to construct an ideology that justified women’s incompatibility with the political organization of the state, women attempted to resist their exclusion and thwart arguments about their inferiority. Although the issue of women’s status has been studied in detail in specific eras, this interdisciplinary collection extends the boundaries of the discussion. Drawing on a wide range of literary and historical sources, including Herodotus’ Histories, Plato’s Laws, María de San José’s Oaxaca Manuscript, and the work of Émilie Du Châtelet, Mary Boykin Chesnut, and Virginia Woolf, the chapters here reveal the various manifestations of the female-inferiority construct. Such an extensive overview of this historical trajectory promotes a deeper understanding of its causes, permutations, and persistence. Women may have made great gains toward political power, but they continue to encounter invisible barriers, raised by traditional stereotypes, that block their path to success. Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion aims to make these barriers visible, raising awareness about the longevity and tenacity of arguments, the roots of which reach classical antiquity.
