Greek Tragedy

Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz is the Margaret Bundy Scott Professor of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College, where she teaches tragedy, modern drama, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. She is the author of Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women (1993), as well as the co-editor of Feminist Theory and the Classics (1993), Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World (2002), and Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (1998), for which she translated Euripides’ Alcestis.

List of Figures. Preface.

Introduction.

Part I Tragedy in Its Athenian Context.

1 What Was Tragedy?.

Definitions of Tragedy.

What Did It Do?.

Where Did It Come From?.

How Were the Plays Performed?.

2 Tragedy and the Polis.

Democracy.

Empire and Hegemony.

Performance Setting.

Rhetoric.

Referentiality.

Ideology.

Nothing to Do with the City?.

3 Tragedy and Greek Religion.

Dionysos.

Sacred Time and Space.

Ritual Practices.

Ritual Practice in Tragedy.

Greek Gods and Mortals.

Tragedy and Myth.

Euripides’ Bacchai.

Part II Thematic Approaches.

4 War and Empire.

Aeschylus’ Persians.

Aeschylus’ Oresteia.

Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis.

5 Family Romance and Revenge in the House of Atreus.

Euripides’ Elektra.

Sophocles’ Elektra.

6 Victims and Victimizers.

Euripides’ Trojan Women.

Euripides’ Hekabe.

Euripides’ Medea.

7 The King and I.

Sophocles’ Antigone.

Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos.

8 Epilogue: Modern Performances (with Sue Blundell).

References.

Index