Author: Sir Arthur Wallace Pickard-Cambridge
Publisher: Hassell Street Press
ISBN: 9781015108158
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 406
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Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Author: Jennifer Wise
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501744941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
What is the nature of theatre's uneasy alliance with literature? Should theatre be viewed as a preliterate, ritualistic phenomenon that can only be compromised by writing? Or should theatre be grouped with other literary arts as essentially'textual,'with even physical performance subsumed under the aegis of textuality? Jennifer Wise, a theatre historian and drama theorist who is also an actor, director, and designer, responds with a challenging and convincing reconstruction of the historical context from which Western theatre first emerged. Wise believes that a comparison of the performance style of oral epic with that of drama as it emerged in sixth-century Greece shows the extent to which theatre was influenced by literate activities relatively new to the ancient world. These activities, foreign to Homer yet familiar to Aeschylus and his contemporaries, included the use of the alphabet, the teaching of texts in schools, the public inscription of laws, the sending and receiving of letters, the exchange of city coinage, and the making of lists. Having changed the way cultural material was processed and transmitted, the technology of writing also led to innovations in the way stories were told, and Wise contends that theatre was the result. However, the art of drama appeared in ancient Greece not only as a beneficiary of literacy but also in defiance of any tendency to see textuality as an end in itself.
Author: Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786451593
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Many playwrights, authors, poets and historians have used images, metaphors and references to and from Greek tragedy, myth and epic to describe the African experience in the New World. The complex relationship between ancient Greek tragedy and modern African American theatre is primarily rooted in America, where the connection between ancient Greece and ancient Africa is explored and debated the most. The different ways in which Greek tragedy has been used by playwrights, directors and others to represent and define African American history and identity are explored in this work. Two models are offered for an Afro-Greek connection: Black Orpheus, in which the Greek connection is metaphorical, expressing the African in terms of the European; and Black Athena, in which ancient Greek culture is "reclaimed" as part of an Afrocentric tradition. African American adaptations of Greek tragedy on the continuum of these two models are then discussed, and plays by Peter Sellars, Adrienne Kennedy, Lee Breuer, Rita Dove, Jim Magnuson, Ernest Ferlita, Steve Carter, Silas Jones, Rhodessa Jones and Derek Walcott are analyzed. The concepts of colorblind and nontraditional casting and how such practices can shape the reception and meaning of Greek tragedy in modern American productions are also covered.
Author: Johanna Hanink
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107062020
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
The first account of how Athens invented the notion of 'classical' tragedy during the later fourth century BC.
Author: Eric Csapo
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311033755X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 590
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Book Description
Age-old scholarly dogma holds that the death of serious theatre went hand-in-hand with the 'death' of the city-state and that the fourth century BC ushered in an era of theatrical mediocrity offering shallow entertainment to a depoliticised citizenry. The traditional view of fourth-century culture is encouraged and sustained by the absence of dramatic texts in anything more than fragments. Until recently, little attention was paid to an enormous array of non-literary evidence attesting, not only the sustained vibrancy of theatrical culture, but a huge expansion of theatre throughout (and even beyond) the Greek world. Epigraphic, historiographic, iconographic and archaeological evidence indicates that the fourth century BC was an age of exponential growth in theatre. It saw: the construction of permanent stone theatres across and beyond the Mediterranean world; the addition of theatrical events to existing festivals; the creation of entirely new contexts for drama; and vast investment, both public and private, in all areas of what was rapidly becoming a major 'industry'. This is the first book to explore all the evidence for fourth century ancient theatre: its architecture, drama, dissemination, staging, reception, politics, social impact, finance and memorialisation.
Author: Eric Csapo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521836824
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 403
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Book Description
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Author: Robin Mitchell-Boyask
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139468235
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
The great plague of Athens that began in 430 BCE had an enormous effect on the imagination of its literary artists and on the social imagination of the city as a whole. In this book, Professor Mitchell-Boyask studies the impact of the plague on Athenian tragedy early in the 420s and argues for a significant relationship between drama and the development of the cult of the healing god Asclepius in the next decade, during a period of war and increasing civic strife. The Athenian decision to locate their temple for Asclepius adjacent to the Theater of Dionysus arose from deeper associations between drama, healing and the polis that were engaged actively by the crisis of the plague. The book also considers the representation of the plague in Thucydides' History as well as the metaphors generated by that representation which recur later in the same work.
Author: Rune Frederiksen
Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
ISBN: 8771249966
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 469
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Book Description
In this volume the leading experts on ancient Greek theatre architecture present new excavation results and new analyses of individual monuments. Many well-known theatres such as the one of Dionysos in Athens and others at for instance Messene, Sikyon, Chaironeia in Greece and Aphrodisias in Turkey have been re-examined since their original publication with stunning results. New research also includes less well-known or newly discovered ancient Greek theatres in Albania, Turkey, Cyprus and Sicily. Further studies on the history of research, regional theatrical developments, terminology and function, as well as a perspective on Roman theatres built in Greek traditions make this volume a comprehensive book of new research for specialist scholars as well as for students and the interested public. Fundamental publications on the topic have not been presented for many years, and this book aims to form a new foundation for the study of theatre architecture.
Author: Ismene Lada-Richards
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198149811
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 387
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Book Description
This book offers a challenging multi-disciplinary interpretation of Aristophanes' Frogs. Drawing on a wide range of literary and anthropological approaches, it deploys an impressive series of religious and cultural considerations which have never previously been used to illuminate this text. Rather than seeking to recover the 'authorial' meaning of the Frogs, Dr Lada-Richards attempts to reconstruct the wider spectrum of potential meanings that various segments of the play could have hadin their own socio-cultural milieu. The key question the book explores is how membership in Greek fifth-century society would have shaped understanding of the play, with particular emphasis on the persona of Dionysus who, as Dr Lada-Richards argues, should not be viewed merely as a stock comic character but as inseparable from the complex, paradoxical figure of his mythical and ritual counterpart. Combining sophistication and complexity with clarity and elegance of style, the book is addressesto the scholar as well as the student of Greek drama and culture, and its insights should appeal to anybody interested in the manifold ways theatre (of any period and culture) remoulds the ritual sequences of the social frame to which it belongs.
Author: David Braund
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107170591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 583
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Book Description
Presents a landmark study combining key specialists around the region with well-established international scholars, from a wide range of disciplines.
