Guilt by Descent: Moral Inheritance and Decision Making in Greek Tragedy (Oxford Classical Monographs) - Softcover

Sewell-Rutter, N. J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199591334 ISBN 13: 9780199591336

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Blighted and accursed families are an inescapable feature of Greek tragedy, and many scholars have treated questions of inherited guilt, curses, and divine causation. N.J. Sewell-Rutter gives these familiar issues a fresh appraisal, arguing that tragedy is a medium that fuses the conceptual with the provoking and exciting of emotion, neither of which can be ignored if the texts are to be fully understood. He pays particular attention to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes and the Phoenician Women of Euripides, both of which dramatize the sorrows of the later generations of the House of Oedipus, but in very different, and perhaps complementary, ways. All Greek quotations are translated, making his study thoroughly accessible to the non-specialist reader.

About this title

About the Author

N.J Sewell-Rutter is Lecturer in Greek, Corpus Christi College, Oxford University (Emeritus).

Review

Review from previous edition "...stimulating and successful...The author's approach to the texts is sound and his arguments lucidly developed. ...a relevant contribution to the studies on tragic concepts about moral inheritance, and will be useful both to students of Greek tragedy and to
scholars interested in broader religious and philosophic questions."

--Enrico Medda BMCR

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0199591334
• ISBN 13: 9780199591336
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 220