Greek Tragic Style: Form, Language and Interpretation - Hardcover

Rutherford, R. B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521848903 ISBN 13: 9780521848909

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Greek tragedy is widely read and performed, but outside the commentary tradition detailed study of the poetic style and language of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides has been relatively neglected. This book seeks to fill that gap by providing an account of the poetics of the tragic genre. The author describes the varied handling of spoken dialogue and of lyric song; major topics such as vocabulary, rhetoric, and imagery are considered in detail and illustrated from a broad range of plays. The contribution of the chorus to the dramas is also discussed. Characterization, irony and generalizing statements are treated in separate chapters and these topics are illuminated by comparisons which show not only what is shared by the three major dramatists but also what distinguishes their practice. The book sheds light both on the genre as a whole and on many particular passages.

About this title

About the Author

R. B. Rutherford was appointed Tutor at Christ Church, Oxford in 1982 and has taught there since, covering Greek and Latin literature in tutorials and lectures. His published work ranges across Greek and Latin, prose and verse, epic, historiography and philosophic prose. Among other works Rutherford has published a Cambridge commentary on books 19 and 20 of the Odyssey (1992), a readable monograph on Homer (1996) and a survey of the whole of classical literature in less than 400 pages (2005). Greek tragedy was the focus of one of his earliest articles and has been a major interest to him ever since.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0521848903
• ISBN 13: 9780521848909
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 492