Sensing Greek Drama

Sensing Greek Drama uses the senses as a heuristic tool to explore ancient Greek tragedy and comedy. The volume adopts an eclectic approach that takes into account different senses and various theoretical models informing them in order to produce new understandings of the form, politics, artistry and experience of ancient Greek drama. 

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Sensing Greek Drama explores ancient Greek tragedy and comedy through the lens of the senses. It works within and beyond a number of recent developments in the scholarship of Classics and related fields. The essays within the volume engage with the senses in drama in manifold ways: through various theoretical frameworks borrowed from kindred fields in the humanities and sciences - postmodernism, humanism, feminism, phenomenology, cognitive theory and neuroscience, to name a few - as well as through the more traditional approaches within Classics of philology, historicism, performance studies and reception. The essays cover a relatively narrow range of tragic and comic plays, instead of encompassing the entirety of ancient drama, in order to foster meaningful links throughout the volume and to exemplify the value of engaging with the senses to produce new understandings of drama - and of the senses themselves. As a result of the volume, the study of Greek drama will be opened up for further research. This will not only appeal to Classicists interested in the meaning of the comedies and tragedies of the fifth century BC, but it will also be of interest to scholars interested in sensory approaches to literature. Above all, Sensing Greek Drama will serve as a call to “to recover our senses”, as Susan Sontag wrote in her famous essay “Against Interpretation”, in a modern age characterized by sensory overload and deprivation.