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The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of Senecan Drama

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Classical Antiquity Studies Renaissance Literature and Culture Classical Philosophy and Thought

Abstract

This monograph is devoted to the most important of Seneca's tragedies, Thyestes, which has had a notable influence on Western drama from Shakespeare to Antonin Artaud. Thyestes emerges as the mastertext of 'Silver' Latin poetry, and as an original reflection on the nature of theatre comparable to Euripides' Bacchae. The book analyses the complex structure of the play, its main themes, the relationship between Seneca's vibrant style and his obsession with dark issues of revenge and regression. Substantial discussion of other plays - especially Trojan Women, Oedipus and Medea - permits a comprehensive re-evaluation of Seneca's poetics and its pivotal role in post-Virgilian literature. Topics explored include the relationship between Seneca's plays and his theory of the emotions, the connection between poetic inspiration and the Underworld, and Seneca's treatment of time, which, in a perspective informed by psychoanalysis, is seen as a central preoccupation of Senecan tragedy.

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References

1985Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion 1993The Fragmentary Latin Poets 1994Actors in the Audience 1996Playing the other: gender and society in classical Greek literature 1995The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition 1982Feminism and Psychoanalysis 2019The Myth of the Eternal Return 1990Recognitions: A Study in Poetics

Cited by

2011Walking in Roman Culture 2006Performance and Identity in the Classical World 2019Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature 2008Martial's Rome: Empire and the Ideology of Epigram 2014Seneca’s Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime 2009Freud's Rome: Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry 2010Embodying the Tragic Father(s): Autobiography and Intertextuality in Aristophanes 2013

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