Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Voltaire / / Paul Hammond.

• Superior document: Faux Titre ; 451
• VerfasserIn: Hammond, Paul,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden; , Boston : : BRILL,, 2021.
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Faux Titre ; 451.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.

Are we free agents? This perennial question is addressed by tragedy when it dramatizes the struggle of individuals with supernatural forces, or maps the inner conflict of a mind divided against itself. The first part of this book follows the adaptations of four myths as they migrate from classical Greek tragedy to Seneca and on to seventeenth-century France: the stories of Agamemnon, Oedipus, Medea, and Phaedra. Detailed linguistic analysis charts the playwrights' contrasting assumptions about agency and autonomy. In the second part, six plays by Corneille and Racine are discussed to show how the problem of agency and free will is explored in scenarios which show protagonists who are in thrall to their past, to their rulers, or to their own ideals.

Table of Contents

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Glossary of Principal Greek Terms -- Abbreviations -- Part 1 Modes of Tragic Agency -- Chapter 1 Preliminary -- Chapter 2 Greek Tragedy -- Chapter 3 Senecan Tragedy -- Chapter 4 French Tragedy -- Part 2 Metamorphoses of Tragic Myth -- Chapter 5 Agamemnon -- 1 Aeschylus -- 2 Seneca -- 3 Boyer -- Chapter 6 Oedipus -- 1 Sophocles -- 2 Seneca -- 3 Corneille -- 4 Voltaire -- 5 Folard -- 6 La Motte -- Chapter 7 Medea -- 1 Euripides -- 2 Seneca -- 3 Corneill -- Chapter 8 Phaedra -- 1 Euripides -- 2 Seneca -- 3 Racine -- Part 3 Models of Freedom and Bondage -- Chapter 9 Preliminary Neo-classical Agency and Its Constraints -- Chapter 10 Corneille: Cinna Discerning Liberty and Tyranny -- Chapter 11 Corneille: Sertorius Nominalism and Liberty in the Empire of Words -- Chapter 12 Corneille: Tite et Bérénice Tragic Freedom -- Chapter 13 Racine: Andromaque The Bondage of Time -- Chapter 14 Racine: Britannicus Forms of Liberty and Servitude -- Chapter 15 Racine: Bérénice The Rhetoric of Space and Self -- Afterword -- Bibliography -- Index.