by Adriana E. Brook
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
Cloth: 978-0-299-31380-7 | eISBN: 978-0-299-31383-8
Library of Congress Classification PA4417.B83 2018
Dewey Decimal Classification 882.01

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ABOUT THIS BOOK
Presenting an innovative new reading of Sophocles' plays, Tragic Rites analyzes the poetic and narrative function of ritual in the seven extant plays of Sophocles. Adriana Brook closely examines four of them—Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus—in the context of her wide-ranging consideration of the entire Sophoclean corpus. Exploring the playwright's dramatic technique, she shows how he used elements of ritual to guide the perceptions and expectations of his fifth-century audience about plot and character.

Employing both modern ritual theory and Aristotle's Poetics, Brook exposes the deep structural analogies between ritual and narrative, the parallels between mistakes in ritual and deviations from the expected in the plot, and the relationship between ritual content and dramatic closure.

See other books on: Greece | Greek drama (Tragedy) | Narrative | Ritual | Sophocles
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