Download or read book Menander s Characters in Context written by Stavroula Kiritsi and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Menander was renowned—and still is—for his naturalistic representations of character and emotion. However, times change, and our ideas of what is ‘natural’ change with them. To appreciate Menander’s art fully, we need to attune ourselves to the expectations of his time, and for this there is no better guide than Aristotle (along with his successor Theophrastus), who described and analysed notions of character and emotion in brilliant detail. This book examines the relevant observations of Aristotle, and explores two of Menander’s comedies in this light. It also discusses how these comedies, which have only been recovered in the past century, were adapted and performed on the Modern Greek stage, where tastes were different and Menander had been virtually unknown. The book’s comparison of the ancient originals and the modern versions sheds new light on both, as well as on cultural values then and now.
Download or read book Reproducing Athens written by Susan Lape and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system. Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.
Download or read book Menander in Antiquity written by Sebastiana Nervegna and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The comic playwright Menander was one of the most popular writers throughout antiquity. This book reconstructs his life and the legacy of his work until the end of antiquity employing a broad range of sources such as portraits, illustrations of his plays, papyri preserving their texts and inscriptions recording their public performances. These are placed within the context of the three social and cultural institutions which appropriated his comedy, thereby ensuring its survival: public theatres, dinner parties and schools. Dr Nervegna carefully reconstructs how each context approached Menander's drama and how it contributed to its popularity over the centuries. The resultant, highly illustrated, book will be essential for all scholars and students not just of Menander's comedy but, more broadly, of the history and iconography of the ancient theatre, ancient social history and reception studies.
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 Menander Samia The Woman from Samos written by Menander and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edition for half a century of any play of Menander designed for English-speaking students reading it in Greek.
Download or read book Menander New Comedy and the Visual written by Antonis K. Petrides and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how both verbal and visual allusion position the plays of New Comedy within the context of contemporary polis culture.
Download or read book Theophrastus Characters written by Sonia Pertsinidis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an introduction to the Characters, a collection of thirty amusing descriptions of character types who lived in Athens in the fourth century BCE. The author of the work, Theophrastus, was Aristotle's colleague, his immediate successor and head of his philosophical school for thirty-five years. Pertsinidis' lively, original and scholarly monograph introduces Theophrastus as a Greek philosopher. It also outlines the remarkable influence of the Characters as a literary work and provides a detailed discussion of the work's purpose and its connection with comedy, ethics and rhetoric.
Download or read book Menander in Contexts written by Alan H. Sommerstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The comedies of the Athenian dramatist Menander (c. 342-291 BC) and his contemporaries were the ultimate source of a Western tradition of light drama that has continued to the present day. Yet for over a millennium, Menander’s own plays were thought to have been completely lost. Thanks to a long and continuing series of papyrus discoveries, Menander has now been able to take his place among the major surviving ancient Greek dramatists alongside Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. In this book, sixteen contributors examine and explore the Menander we know today in light of the various literary, intellectual, and social contexts in which his plays can be viewed. Topics covered include: the society, culture, and politics of his generation; the intellectual currents of the period; the literary precursors who inspired Menander (or whom he expected his audiences to recall); and responses to Menander, from his own time to ours. As the first wide-ranging collective study of Menander in English, this book is essential reading for those interested in ancient comedy the world over.
Download or read book Samia written by Menander and published by . This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the discovery in Egypt of papyrus books we now know much more about Greek 'New Comedy' and the plays of its greatest exponent, Menander, but his second best preserved play, Samia, is not yet generally known. In this new edition the text takes account of all recent scholarly work, with the facing translation as an aid to interpretation. The commentary elucidates the text, explaining the themes and conventions of New Comedy, and emphasizing the text's dramatic nature. The Samia is among the ancestors of modern comedy, whose traditions are derived from Menander and the Greek plays adapted by Plautus and Terence for Roman audiences.
Download or read book Roman Drama and its Contexts written by Stavros Frangoulidis and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roman plays have been well studied individually (even including fragmentary or spurious ones more recently). However, they have not always been placed into their ‘context’, though plays (just like items in other literary genres) benefit from being seen in context. This edited collection aims to address this issue: it includes 33 contributions by an international team of scholars, discussing single plays or Roman dramatic genres (including comedy, tragedy and praetexta, from both the Republican and imperial periods) in contexts such as the literary tradition, the relationship to works in other literary genres, the historical and social situation, the intellectual background or the later reception. Overall, they offer a rich panorama of the role of Roman drama or individual plays in Roman society and literary history. The insights gained thereby will be of relevance to everyone interested in Roman drama or literature more generally, comparative literature or drama and theatre studies. This contextual approach has the potential of changing the way in which Roman drama is viewed.
Download or read book Aristotle and Menander on the Ethics of Understanding written by Valeria Cinaglia and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Aristotle and Menander on the Ethics of Understanding, Valeria Cinaglia offers a parallel study of Menander’s New Comedy and Aristotle’s philosophy focusing on subjects ranging from epistemology and psychology to ethics. Cinaglia does not aim to demonstrate the direct philosophical influence of Aristotle on Menander, but explores the hypothesis that there are significant analogies between the two that disclose a shared thought-world. Cinaglia shows that Aristotle and Menander offer analogous views of the way that perceptions and emotional responses to situations are linked with the presence or absence of ethical and cognitive understanding, or the state of ethical character development: the study of these analogies contributes to a deeper understanding of both frameworks involved.
Download or read book A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama written by Ian C. Storey and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This newly updated second edition features wide-ranging, systematically organized scholarship in a concise introduction to ancient Greek drama, which flourished from the sixth to third century BC. Covers all three genres of ancient Greek drama – tragedy, comedy, and satyr-drama Surveys the extant work of Aeschylus, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander, and includes entries on ‘lost’ playwrights Examines contextual issues such as the origins of dramatic art forms; the conventions of the festivals and the theater; drama’s relationship with the worship of Dionysos; political dimensions of drama; and how to read and watch Greek drama Includes single-page synopses of every surviving ancient Greek play
Download or read book Greek and Roman Actors written by P. E. Easterling and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-26 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of twenty essays examines the art, profession and idea of the actor in Greek and Roman antiquity, and has been commissioned and arranged to cast as much interdisciplinary and transhistorical light as possible on these elusive but fascinating ancient professionals. It covers a chronological span from the sixth century BC to Byzantium (and even beyond to the way that ancient actors have influenced the arts from the Renaissance to the twentieth century) and stresses the huge geographical spread of ancient actors. Some essays focus on particular themes, such as the evidence for women actors or the impact of acting on the presentation of suicide in literature; others offer completely new evidence, such as graffiti relating to actors in Asia Minor; others ask new questions, such as what subjective experience can be reconstructed for the ancient actor. There are numerous illustrations and all Greek and Latin passages are translated.
Download or read book Reading Greek Tragedy written by Simon Goldhill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-05-08 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An advanced critical introduction to Greek tragedy for those who do not read Greek. Combines the best contemporary scholarly analysis of the classics with a wide knowledge of contemporary literary studies in discussing the masterpieces of Athenian drama.
Download or read book The Theater of Plautus written by Timothy J. Moore and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between actors and spectators has been of perennial interest to playwrights. The Roman playwright Plautus (ca. 200 BCE) was particularly adept at manipulating this relationship. Plautus allowed his actors to acknowledge freely the illusion in which they were taking part, to elicit laughter through humorous asides and monologues, and simultaneously to flatter and tease the spectators. These metatheatrical techniques are the focus of Timothy J. Moore's innovative study of the comedies of Plautus. The first part of the book examines Plautus' techniques in detail, while the second part explores how he used them in the plays Pseudolus, Amphitruo, Curculio, Truculentus, Casina, and Captivi. Moore shows that Plautus employed these dramatic devices not only to entertain his audience but also to satirize aspects of Roman society, such as shady business practices and extravagant spending on prostitutes, and to challenge his spectators' preconceptions about such issues as marriage and slavery. These findings forge new links between Roman comedy and the social and historical context of its performance.
Download or read book Culture In Pieces written by Dirk Obbink and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays is chiefly concerned with the problems of interpretation raised by fragmentary evidence, especially by the partial or imperfect survival of texts from the classical world. The essays consider a variety of problems, addressing questions of literary history, source-criticism, editorial method, and scholarly technique.
Download or read book The Dyskolos written by Menander (of Athens.) and published by Plume. This book was released on 1984 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the discovery and translation of the Dyskolos ("The Grouch"), Menander comes alive with subtle philosophy and vision. His world of troubled lovers, scheming servants, and foolish old men, with its witty dialogue and quick turnabouts in plot, offers friendly advice on life as we still experience it today and insightful commentary on the shortcomings of humanity. In this play about an outrageous misanthrope, the mischief he causes, and the comeuppance he receives, we encounter a comic spirit that Molière would have bowed to in homage.
