Author: Ariana Traill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139472623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Taking a fresh look at mistaken identity in the work of an author who helped to introduce the device to comedy, in this book Professor Traill shows how the outrageous mistakes many male characters in Menander make about women are grounded in their own emotional needs. The core of the argument derives from analysis of speeches by or about women, with particular attention to the language used to articulate problems of knowledge and perception, responsibility and judgement. Not only does Menander freely borrow language, situations, and themes from tragedy, but he also engages with some of tragedy's epistemological questions, particularly the question of how people interpret what they see and hear. Menander was instrumental in turning the tragic theme of human ignorance into a comic device and inventing a plot type with enormous impact on the western tradition. This book provides original insights into his achievements within their historical and intellectual context.
Author: Antonis K. Petrides
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107068436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
This book shows how both verbal and visual allusion position the plays of New Comedy within the context of contemporary polis culture.
Author: Menander
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521514282
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
The first edition for half a century of any play of Menander designed for English-speaking students reading it in Greek.
Author: Stavroula Kiritsi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152754494X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
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.
Author: Matthew Wright
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350124788
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Matthew Wright brings Menander's Samia to life by explaining how it achieves its comic effects and how it fits within the broader context of fourth-century Greek drama and society. He offers a scene-by-scene reading of the play, combining close attention to detail with broader consideration of major themes, in an approach designed to bring out the humour and nuance of each individual moment on stage, while also illuminating Menander's comic art. The play dramatizes a tangled story of mistakes, mishaps and misapprehensions leading up to the marriage of Moschion and Plangon. For most of the action the characters are at odds with one another owing to accidental delusions or deliberate deceptions, and it seems as if the marriage will be cancelled or indefinitely postponed; but ultimately everyone's problems are solved and the play ends happily. Samia is one of the best-preserved examples of fourth-century Greek comedy: celebrated within antiquity but subsequently lost for many years, it miraculously came back to light, in almost complete form, as a result of Egyptian papyrus finds during the 20th century.
Author: Sebastiana Nervegna
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110732825X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
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.
Author: Terence
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 1585107751
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 83
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Book Description
The play Adelphoe provides an introduction to the world of Roman comedy from one of its best practitioners, Terence. As with all Focus translations, the emphasis is on an inexpensive, readable edition that is close to the original, with an extensive introduction, notes and appendices.
Author: Eftychia Bathrellou
Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
ISBN: 191370145X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Colin Austin (1941–2010), Professor of Greek at Cambridge and distinguished editor of poetic texts, was renowned for the precision and brilliance of his scholarship. This collection of studies, offered by some of his pupils, aims to honor his memory. The papers combine philology and textual criticism with a strong interest in setting the works under examination in their literary and cultural context. Individual contributions are devoted to the establishment of the text of the comic poet Menander and the epigrammatist Posidippus of Pella, while one chapter offers a new critical edition of and the first detailed commentary on a number of erotic epigrams. Other essays explore poetic, performative and narratological features in Socratic works of Plato and Xenophon. The volume also includes an analysis of the trope of pathetic fallacy in the bucolic poem Epitaph for Bion and a study of the concept of ‘frigidity’ in ancient literary criticism.
Author: Sophia Papaioannou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443869678
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
PIERIDES IV This volume examines interpretation as the original process of critical reception vis-a-vis Terence’s experimental comedies. The book, which consists of two parts, looks at Terence as both an agent and a subject of interpretation. The First Part (‘Terence as Interpreter’) examines Terence as an interpreter of earlier literary traditions, both Greek and Roman. The Second Part (‘Interpretations of Terence’) identifies and explores different expressions of the critical reception of Terence’s output. The papers in both sections illustrate the various expressions of originality and individual creative genius that the process of interpretation entails. The volume at hand is the first study to focus not only on the interpreter, but also on the continuity and evolution of the principles of interpretation. In this way, it directs the focus from Terence’s work to the meaning of Terence’s work in relation to his predecessors (the past literary tradition), his contemporaries (his literary antagonists, but also his audience), and posterity (his critical readers across the centuries).
Author: Plautus
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 1585107786
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 83
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Book Description
The play Captivi provides an introduction to the world of Roman comedy from one of its best practitioners, Plautus. As with all Focus translations, the emphasis is on an inexpensive, readable edition that is close to the original, with an extensive introduction, notes and appendices.
