Robert E. Sherwood and the Classical Tradition

Robert E. Sherwood and the Classical Tradition PDF Author: Robert J. Rabel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000079317
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This volume explores the reception of the classical past in the works of twentieth-century American dramatist Robert E. Sherwood and his use of the ancient world to critique key events and trends in American history. It explores his comedies and the influence of both Greek Old and New Comedy, as well as his mediation of his experiences in World War I through Livy’s account of the war with Carthage. During the 1930s, Sherwood used the Peloponnesian War as a template for bringing to the attention of an unaware public the danger of an impending war between the forces of democracy and the totalitarianism represented by Nazi Germany, and post-war he raised awareness of the dangers of nuclear war through the lens of the Greek gods. As well as looking at his use of the classical past in his work, since Sherwood wrote drama deeply concerned with the major social and political events of his day, his plays open windows onto the major social and political challenges facing the United States and the world from the outbreak of World War I until the beginning of the nuclear age. This volume will be of interest to anyone working on the Classical Tradition and Classical Reception, as well as to students of twentieth-century American literature, drama, history, and politics.

Robert E. Sherwood and the Classical Tradition

Robert E. Sherwood and the Classical Tradition PDF Author: Robert J. Rabel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000079317
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores the reception of the classical past in the works of twentieth-century American dramatist Robert E. Sherwood and his use of the ancient world to critique key events and trends in American history. It explores his comedies and the influence of both Greek Old and New Comedy, as well as his mediation of his experiences in World War I through Livy’s account of the war with Carthage. During the 1930s, Sherwood used the Peloponnesian War as a template for bringing to the attention of an unaware public the danger of an impending war between the forces of democracy and the totalitarianism represented by Nazi Germany, and post-war he raised awareness of the dangers of nuclear war through the lens of the Greek gods. As well as looking at his use of the classical past in his work, since Sherwood wrote drama deeply concerned with the major social and political events of his day, his plays open windows onto the major social and political challenges facing the United States and the world from the outbreak of World War I until the beginning of the nuclear age. This volume will be of interest to anyone working on the Classical Tradition and Classical Reception, as well as to students of twentieth-century American literature, drama, history, and politics.

Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature

Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature PDF Author: Stephen J. Rojcewicz, Jr.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000480747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This book delineates how Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), a learned playwright and novelist, embeds himself within the classical tradition, integrating Greek and Roman motifs with a wide range of sources to produce heart-breaking masterpieces such as Our Town and comedy sensations such as Dolly Levi. Through this study of archival sources and close reading, readers will understand Wilder’s avant-garde staging and innovative time sequences not as a break with the past, but as a response to the classics. The author traces the genesis of unforgettable characters like Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker, Emily Webb in Our Town, and George Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth. Vergil’s expression, "Here are the tears of the world, and human matters touch the heart" haunts Wilder’s oeuvre. Understanding Vergil’s phrase as "tears for the beauty of the world," Wilder utilizes scenes depicting the beauty of the world and the sorrow when individuals recognize this too late. Wilder exhorts us to observe lovingly, alert to the wonder of the everyday. This work will appeal to actors and directors, professors and students in classics and in American literature, those fascinated by modern drama and performance studies, and non-specialists, theatre-goers, and readers in the general public.

Animals in Ancient Greek Religion

Animals in Ancient Greek Religion PDF Author: Julia Kindt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429754590
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This book provides the first systematic study of the role of animals in different areas of the ancient Greek religious experience, including in myth and ritual, the literary and the material evidence, the real and the imaginary. An international team of renowned contributors shows that animals had a sustained presence not only in the traditionally well-researched cultural practice of blood sacrifice but across the full spectrum of ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices. Animals played a role in divination, epiphany, ritual healing, the setting up of dedications, the writing of binding spells, and the instigation of other ‘magical’ means. Taken together, the individual contributions to this book illustrate that ancient Greek religion constituted a triangular symbolic system encompassing not just gods and humans, but also animals as a third player and point of reference. Animals in Ancient Greek Religion will be of interest to students and scholars of Greek religion, Greek myth, and ancient religion more broadly, as well as for anyone interested in human/animal relations in the ancient world.

Drama, Oratory and Thucydides in Fifth-Century Athens

Drama, Oratory and Thucydides in Fifth-Century Athens PDF Author: Sophie Mills
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429632703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This study centres on the rhetoric of the Athenian empire, Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War and the notable discrepancies between his assessment of Athens and that found in tragedy, funeral orations and public art. Mills explores the contradiction between Athenian actions and their self-representation, arguing that Thucydides’ highly critical, cynical approach to the Athenian empire does not reflect how the average Athenian saw his city’s power. The popular education of the Athenians, as presented to them in funeral speeches, drama and public art told a very different story from that presented by Thucydides’ history, and it was far more palatable to ordinary Athenians since it offered them a highly flattering portrayal of their city and, by extension, each individual who made up that city. Drama, Oratory and Thucydides in Fifth-Century Athens: Teaching Imperial Lessons offers a fascinating insight into Athenian self-representation and will be of interest to anyone working on classical Athens, the Greek polis and classical historiography.

Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama

Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama PDF Author: Jonathan J. Price
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429656351
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
This collection presents 19 interconnected studies on the language, history, exegesis, and cultural setting of Greek epic and dramatic poetic texts ("Text") and their afterlives ("Intertext") in Antiquity. Spanning texts from Hittite archives to Homer to Greek tragedy and comedy to Vergil to Celsus, the studies here were all written by friends and colleagues of Margalit Finkelberg who are experts in their particular fields, and who have all been influenced by her work. The papers offer close readings of individual lines and discussion of widespread cultural phenomena. Readers will encounter Hittite precedents to the Homeric poems, characters in ancient epic analysed by modern cognitive theory, the use of Homer in Christian polemic, tragic themes of love and murder, a history of the Sphinx, and more. Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama offers a selection of fascinating essays exploring Greek epic, drama, and their reception and adaption by other ancient authors, and will be of interest to anyone working on Greek literature.

The American Cinema

The American Cinema PDF Author: Donald E. Staples
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Motion picture industry
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description


The Classical Hollywood Cinema

The Classical Hollywood Cinema PDF Author: David Bordwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134988095
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 791

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Book Description
Acclaimed for its breakthrough approach and its combination of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this is the standard work on the classical Hollywood cinema style of film-making from the silent era to the 1960s.

Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition

Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition PDF Author: Geoffrey Block
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300105278
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Although Charles Ives has long been viewed as the quintessential American composer, he placed himself in the European classical tradition, drew on it heavily for his aesthetic philosophy and musical techniques, and extended it to create something new. This book illuminates Ives's music by comparing it with that of other composers in Europe and the United States. Edited by two highly regarded Ives scholars, the book begins with essays that examine the influences on Ives of his musical predecessors and concludes with essays that find extensive parallels between Ives and such European contemporaries as Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, and Stravinsky, whose music he knew little or not at all, but with whom he shared influences and concerns. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate that even apparently strange or distinctively American aspects of Ives's music--from his penchant for quotation to his juxtaposition of disparate styles--have strong precedents and parallels among European composers. Ives emerges as a composer at home in the classical tradition, engaged in exploring the same issues that confronted composers of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire

Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire PDF Author: Dana Fields
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000067963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire discusses the significance of parrhēsia (free and frank speech) in Greek culture of the Roman empire. The term parrhēsia first emerged in the context of the classical Athenian democracy and was long considered a key democratic and egalitarian value. And yet, references to frank speech pervade the literature of the Roman empire, a time when a single autocrat ruled over most of the known world, Greek cities were governed at the local level by entrenched oligarchies, and social hierarchy was becoming increasingly stratified. This volume challenges the traditional view that the meaning of the term changed radically after Alexander the Great, and shows rather that parrhēsia retained both political and ethical significance well into the Roman empire. By examining references to frankness in political writings, rhetoric, philosophy, historiography, biographical literature, and finally satire, the volume also explores the dynamics of political power in the Roman empire, where politics was located in interpersonal relationships as much as, if not more than, in institutions. The contested nature of the power relations in such interactions - between emperors and their advisors, between orators and the cities they counseled, and among fellow members of the oligarchic elite in provincial cities - reveals the political implications of a prominent post-classical intellectual development that reconceptualizes true freedom as belonging to the man who behaves - and speaks - freely. At the same time, because the role of frank speaker is valorized, those who claim it also lay themselves open to suspicions of self-promotion and hypocrisy. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of rhetoric and political thought in the ancient world, and to anyone interested in ongoing debates about intellectual freedom, limits on speech, and the advantages of presenting oneself as a truth-teller.

People in Books

People in Books PDF Author: Margaret E. Nicholsen
Publisher: H. W. Wilson
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 816

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Book Description