Tragic Rites: Narrative and Ritual in Sophoclean Drama (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780299313807)

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.

Author: Adriana E. Brook
ISBN-10: 0299313808
ISBN-13: 9780299313807
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Language: English
Published: 01/16/2018
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2018