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Author: Norman T. Pratt Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 9780807815557 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
With insight and clarity, Norman Pratt makes available to the general reader an understanding of the major elements that shaped Seneca's plays. These he defines as Neo-Stoicism, declamatory rhetoric, and the chaotic, violent conditions of Senecan society. Seneca's drama shows the nature of this society and uses freely the declamatory rhetorical techniques familiar to any well-educated Roman. But the most important element, Pratt argues, is Neo-Stoicism, including technical aspects of this philosophy that previously have escaped notice. With these ingredients Seneca transformed the themes and characters inherited from Greek drama, casting them in a form that so radically departs from the earlier drama that Seneca's plays require a different mode of criticism. "The greatest need in the criticism of this drama is to understand its legitimacy as drama of a new kind in the anicent tradition," Pratt writes. "It cannot be explained as an inferior imitation of Greek tragedy because, though inferior, it is not imitative in the strict sense of the word and has its own nature and motivation." Pratt shows the functional interrelationship among philosophy, rhetoric, and "society" in Seneca's nine plays and assesses the plays' dramatic qualities. He finds that however melodramatic the plays may seem to the modern reader, Seneca's own career as Nero's mentor, statesman, and spokesman was scarcely less tumultuous than the lives of his characters. When the Neo-Stoicism and rhetoric of the plays are charged with Seneca's own tortured, passionate life, Pratt concludes, "The result is inevitably melodrama, melodrama of such energy and force that it changed the course of Western drama." Originally published in 1983. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Author: Norman T. Pratt Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 9780807815557 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
With insight and clarity, Norman Pratt makes available to the general reader an understanding of the major elements that shaped Seneca's plays. These he defines as Neo-Stoicism, declamatory rhetoric, and the chaotic, violent conditions of Senecan society. Seneca's drama shows the nature of this society and uses freely the declamatory rhetorical techniques familiar to any well-educated Roman. But the most important element, Pratt argues, is Neo-Stoicism, including technical aspects of this philosophy that previously have escaped notice. With these ingredients Seneca transformed the themes and characters inherited from Greek drama, casting them in a form that so radically departs from the earlier drama that Seneca's plays require a different mode of criticism. "The greatest need in the criticism of this drama is to understand its legitimacy as drama of a new kind in the anicent tradition," Pratt writes. "It cannot be explained as an inferior imitation of Greek tragedy because, though inferior, it is not imitative in the strict sense of the word and has its own nature and motivation." Pratt shows the functional interrelationship among philosophy, rhetoric, and "society" in Seneca's nine plays and assesses the plays' dramatic qualities. He finds that however melodramatic the plays may seem to the modern reader, Seneca's own career as Nero's mentor, statesman, and spokesman was scarcely less tumultuous than the lives of his characters. When the Neo-Stoicism and rhetoric of the plays are charged with Seneca's own tortured, passionate life, Pratt concludes, "The result is inevitably melodrama, melodrama of such energy and force that it changed the course of Western drama." Originally published in 1983. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Author: Curtis Perry Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108496172 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 307
Book Description
Perry reveals Shakespeare derived modes of tragic characterization, previously seen as presciently modern, via engagement with Rome and Senecan tragedy.
Author: Thomas Kohn Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472028820 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 184
Book Description
The first-century Roman tragedies of Seneca, like all ancient drama, do not contain the sort of external stage directions that we are accustomed to today; nevertheless, a careful reading of the plays reveals such stage business as entrances, exits, setting, sound effects, emotions of the characters, etc. The Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedy teases out these dramaturgical elements in Seneca's work and uses them both to aid in the interpretation of the plays and to show the playwright's artistry. Thomas D. Kohn provides a detailed overview of the corpus, laying the groundwork for appreciating Seneca's techniques in the individual dramas. Each of the chapters explores an individual tragedy in detail, discussing the dramatis personae and examining how the roles would be distributed among a limited number of actors, as well as the identity of the Chorus. The Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedymakes a compelling argument for Seneca as an artist and a dramaturg in the true sense of the word: "a maker of drama." Regardless of whether Seneca composed his plays for full-blown theatrical staging, a fictive theater of the mind, or something in between, Kohn demonstrates that he displays a consistency and a careful attentiveness to details of performance. While other scholars have applied this type of performance criticism to individual tragedies or scenes, this is the first comprehensive study of all the plays in twenty-five years, and the first ever to consider not just stagecraft, but also metatheatrical issues such as the significant distribution of roles among a limited number of actors, in addition to the emotional states of the characters. Scholars of classics and theater, along with those looking to stage the plays, will find much of interest in this study.
Author: Lucius Annaeus Seneca Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192807064 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 277
Book Description
This is a lively, readable and accurate verse translation of the six best plays by one of the most influential of all classical Latin writers. The volume includes Phaedra, Oedipus, Medea, Trojan Women, Hercules Furens, and Thyestes, together with an invaluable introduction and notes.
Author: A. J. Boyle Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134802315 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Tragic Seneca undertakes a radical re-evaluation of Seneca's plays, their relationship to Roman imperial culture and their instrumental role in the evolution of the European theatrical tradition. Following an introduction on the history of the Roman theatre, the book provides a dramatic and cultural critique of the whole of Seneca's corpus, analysing the declamatory form of the plays, their rhetoric, interiority, stagecraft and spectacle, dramatic, ideological and moral structure and their overt theatricality. Each of Seneca's plays is examined in detail, locating the force of Senecan drama not only in the moral complexity of the texts and their representations of power, violence, history, suffering and the self, but the semiotic interplay of text, tradition and culture. The later chapters focus on Seneca's influence on Italian, English and French drama of the Renaissance. A.J. Boyle argues that tragedians such as Cinthio, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Corneille, and Racine owe a debt to Seneca that goes beyond allusion, dramatic form and the treatment of tyranny and revenge to the development of the tragic sensibility and the metatheatrical mind. Tragic Seneca attempts to restore Seneca to a central position in the European literary tradition. It will provide readers and directors of Seneca's plays with the essential critical guide to their intellectual, cultural and dramatic complexity.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004310983 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 342
Book Description
In Brill's Companion to the Reception of Senecan Tragedy, Dodson-Robinson incorporates interdisciplinary essays tracing how Western writers from antiquity to the present have transformed Senecan drama to develop competing tragic visions of agency and the human place in the universe.
Author: Christopher V. Trinacty Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199356572 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
In their practice of aemulatio, the mimicry of older models of writing, the Augustan poets often looked to the Greeks: Horace drew inspiration from the lyric poets, Virgil from Homer, and Ovid from Hesiod, Callimachus, and others. But by the time of the great Roman tragedian Seneca, the Augustan poets had supplanted the Greeks as the "classics" to which Seneca and his contemporaries referred. Indeed, Augustan poetry is a reservoir of language, motif, and thought for Seneca's writing. Strangely, however, there has not yet been a comprehensive study revealing the relationship between Seneca and his Augustan predecessors. Christopher Trinacty's Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry is the long-awaited answer to the call for such a study. Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry uniquely places Senecan tragedy in its Roman literary context, offering a further dimension to the motivations and meaning behind Seneca's writings. By reading Senecan tragedy through an intertextual lens, Trinacty reveals Seneca's awareness of his historical moment, in which the Augustan period was eroding steadily around him. Seneca, looking back to the poetry of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, acts as a critical interpreter of both their work and their era. He deconstructs the language of the Augustan poets, refiguring it through the perspective of his tragic protagonists. In doing so, he positions himself as a critic of the Augustan tradition and reveals a poetic voice that often subverts the classical ethos of that tradition. Through this process of reappropriation Seneca reveals much about himself as a playwright and as a man: In the inventive manner in which he re-employs the Augustan poets' language, thought, and poetics within the tragic framework, Seneca gives his model works new--and uniquely Senecan--life. Trinacty's analysis sheds new light both on Seneca and on his Augustan predecessors. As such, Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry promises to be a groundbreaking contribution to the study of both Senecan tragedy and Augustan poetry.
Author: Norman T. Pratt
Author: Norman T. Pratt
Author: Curtis Perry
Author: Thomas Kohn
Author: Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Author: Shadi Bartsch
Author: Thomas Norton
Author: A. J. Boyle
Author: Thomas Kohn
Author: 
Author: Christopher V. Trinacty