Greek Comedy and the Discourse of Genres


Book Description

Explores comedy's voracious and multifarious dialogue with a large spectrum of literary, sub-literary and paraliterary traditions surrounding and shaping it.




Brill's Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy


Book Description

The present volume sets forth the main resources for the advancing student of Ancient Greek Comedy. An international roster of specialists contributes chapters organized into three sections: "Contexts": the intellectual, physical and socio-historical setting of Athenian Comedy; "History": the literary history of the Old, Middle and New periods; and "Elements": the text, language and formal components of the genre (including a comprehensive bibliography). This Companion is designed as a resource for understanding and interpreting the classics of Athenian Comedy from its inception through Menander. It will also be useful for navigating the principal corpora of texts, fragments and scholia that have been revised and augmented in recent years.This unique volume occupies the middle ground between short surveys and highly specialized scholarship. Contributors include: W. Geoffrey Arnott, Angus Bowie, Eric Csapo, Gregory W. Dobrov, J. Richard Green, Stanley Ireland, Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, S. Douglas Olson, Alan H. Sommerstein, Ian Storey, Ralph M. Rosen, Andreas Willi, Bernhard Zimmermann.




A Companion to Aristophanes


Book Description

Provides a comprehensive and systematic treatment of the life and work of Aristophanes A Companion to Aristophanes provides an invaluable set of foundational resources for undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars alike. More than a basic reference text, this innovative volume situates each of Aristophanes' surviving plays within discussion of key themes relevant to the study of the Aristophanic corpus. Throughout the Companion, an international panel of contributors incorporates material culture and performance context, offers methodological and theoretical insights into the study of Aristophanes, demonstrates the relevance of Aristophanes to modern life, and more. Each chapter focused on a particular play is paired with a theme that is exemplified by that play, such as gender, sexuality, religion, ritual, and satire. With an emphasis on understanding Greek comedy and its ancient Athenian context, the text includes approaches to Aristophanes through criticism, performance, translation, and teaching to encourage and inform future work on Greek comedy. Illustrating the vitality of contemporary engagement with one of the world's great literary figures, this comprehensive volume: Helps new readers and teachers of Aristophanes appreciate the broader importance of each play within the study of antiquity Offers sophisticated analyses of the Aristophanic corpus and its place in literary and cultural history Includes chapters focused on teaching Aristophanes, including one emphasizing performance Provides detailed syllabi and lesson plans for integrating the material into high school and college curricula A Companion to Aristophanes is an essential resource for advanced students and instructors in Classics, Ancient Literature, Comparative Literature, and Ancient Drama and Theater. It is also a must-have reference for academic scholars, university libraries, non-specialist Classicists and other literary critics researching ancient drama, and sophisticated general readers interested in Aristophanes, Greek drama, classical Athens, or the ancient Mediterranean world.




Aristophanes' Frogs


Book Description

Aristophanes is widely credited with having elevated the classical art of comedy to the level of legitimacy and recognition that only tragedy had hitherto achieved, and producing some of the most intriguing works of literature to survive from classical Greece in the process. Among them, Frogs has a unique appeal; written and performed in 405 BCE, the comedy won first prize in that year's Lenaea festival competition and was re-performed soon thereafter--a rare occurrence for comedies at the time. Frogs has been admired and quoted by readers and critics ever since, a testament to its timeless appeal; it remains among the most approachable of Aristophanes' plays, as well as perhaps the richest of all in insights it provides into ancient Greek cultural attitudes and values. Mark Griffith's study of the Frogs is the first single book to offer a reliable and sophisticated account of this play in light of modern notions of culture, performance, democracy, religion, and aesthetics. After placing the work in its original historical, cultural, and biographical context, Griffith goes on to underscore the originality of Frogs in relation to parallel developments in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, among others. He highlights the play's unique portrayal of the figure of Dionysus, the Eleusinian mystery cult, and the question of life after death. This title provides not only a detailed analysis of the play and a concise account of its reception, but also a succinct introduction to ancient Greek comedy, exploring the extraordinary range of theatrical conventions, moral and aesthetic assumptions, and religious beliefs that underlie the action of Aristophanes' play. The book provides an invaluable companion to Aristophanes and the theater of classical Greece for students and general readers alike.




Tragedy on the Comic Stage


Book Description

Aristophanes' engagement with tragedy is one of the most striking features of his comedies. Tragedy on the Comic Stage contextualizes this engagement with tragedy within Greek comedy as a genre by examining paratragedy in the fragments of Aristophanes' contemporaries and successors in the fifth and fourth centuries.




The Art of Veiled Speech


Book Description

The Art of Veiled Speech offers new insights into the historical origins of self-censorship used to temper controversial views, revealing that the human voice cannot easily be silenced.




The Origin of Attic Comedy


Book Description




Human and Animal in Ancient Greece


Book Description

Animals were omnipresent in the everyday life and the visual arts of classical Greece. In literature, too, they had significant functions.This book discusses the role of animals - both domestic and wild - and mythological hybrid creatures in ancient Greek literature. Challenging the traditional view of the Greek anthropocentrism, the authors provide a nuanced interpretation of the classical relationship to animals. Through a close textual analysis, they highlight the emergence of the perspective of animals in Greek literature. Central to the book's enquiry is the question of empathy: investigating the ways in which ancient Greek authors invited their readers to empathise with non-human counterparts. The book presents case studies on the animal similes in the Iliad, the addresses to animals and nature in Sophocles' Philoctetes, the human-bird hybrids in The Birds by Aristophanes and the animal protagonists of Anyte's epigrams. Throughout, the authors develop an innovative methodology that combines philological and historical analysis with a philosophy of embodiment, or phenomenology of the body. Shedding new light on how animals were regarded in ancient Greek society, the book will be of interest to classicists, historians, philosophers, literary scholars and all those studying empathy and the human-animal relationship.




Reconstructing Satyr Drama


Book Description

The origins of satyr drama, and particularly the reliability of the account in Aristotle, remains contested, and several of this volume’s contributions try to make sense of the early relationship of satyr drama to dithyramb and attempt to place satyr drama in the pre-Classical performance space and traditions. What is not contested is the relationship of satyr drama to tragedy as a required cap to the Attic trilogy. Here, however, how Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (to whom one complete play and the preponderance of the surviving fragments belong) envisioned the relationship of satyr drama to tragedy in plot, structure, setting, stage action and language is a complex subject tackled by several contributors. The playful satyr chorus and the drunken senility of Silenos have always suggested some links to comedy and later to Atellan farce and phlyax. Those links are best examined through language, passages in later Greek and Roman writers, and in art. The purpose of this volume is probe as many themes and connections of satyr drama with other literary genres, as well as other art forms, putting satyr drama on stage from the sixth century BC through the second century AD. The editors and contributors suggest solutions to some of the controversies, but the volume shows as much that the field of study is vibrant and deserves fuller attention.