Euripides and the Boundaries of the Human

By (author) Mark Ringer

Publication date:

29 July 2016

Length of book:

392 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498518437

Euripides and the Boundaries of the Human presents the first single-volume reading in nearly fifty years of all of Euripides’ surviving plays. Rather than examining one or a handful of dramas in monograph or article form, Mark Ringer insists on the thematic and stylistic parallels that unite a diverse canon of works. Euripides is often referred to as the most modern of the three Ancient Greek tragedians, but in what way can the work of this fifth-century B.C. artist be claimed as modern? The multi-layered presentation of character is new within the context of Athenian Tragedy. The plays also reveal equal concern with the preservation and re-vitalization of tradition, especially with respect to the portrayal of the Olympian gods. Euripidean drama upholds tradition just as vigorously as it posits a new kind of realism in character portrayal in the Ancient Theatre. Euripidean drama fuses what was old with what was new in order to revitalize and perpetuate the art of tragedy.

This book will be of interest to professionals and students in the fields of classics, Greek drama in translation or in the original Greek, theater studies, comparative literature, tragedy, and religion.
Mark Ringer provides a useful work that analyzes all nineteen of the extant plays attributed to Euripides in chronological order of each one’s commonly understood date of completion. . . All in all, this is a valuable contribution to research on Euripides’ works, and it will be a useful addition to many undergraduate and graduate libraries.