Apollo And His Oracle In The Oresteia

He who learns must suffer. Before setting out for the Trojan War, King Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. Many years later, when Agamemnon returns to his palace, his adulterous Queen Clytemnestra takes her revenge by brutally murdering him and installing her lover on the throne. How will the gods judge Orestes, their estranged son, who must avenge his father's death by murdering his mother? The curse of the House of Atreus, passing from generation to generation, is one of the great myths of Western literature. In the hands of Aeschylus, the story enacts the final victory of reason and justice over superstition and barbarity. The original trilogy, comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and Eumenides, is distilled into one thrilling three-act play in this magnificent new translation by award-winning playwright Rory Mullarkey.

Prophesying Tragedy investigates the political and epistemological dimensions of the conflict between heroes and prophets in homer's Iliad and Sophocles' Theban plays, Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus. Rebecca Weld Bushnell asserts that an understanding of tragic fate, as represented in prophecy, can be achieved through an awareness of the historical relationship of tragedy to culture and politics, for the tragic hero's interpretation and defiance of prophecy both reflected and influenced the political abuse of oracles and omens.

"In this new translation the strangeness of the original Greek and its enduring human truth come alive in language that is remarkable for its unrelenting poetic intensity, its rich metaphorical texture, and a verbal density that can at times modulate into the simplest expressions.

In this book J. Peter Euben argues that Greek tragedy was the context for classical political theory and that such theory read in terms of tragedy provides a ground for contemporary theorizing alert to the concerns of post-modernism, such as normalization, the dominance of humanism, and the status of theory. Euben shows how ancient Greek theater offered a place and occasion for reflection on the democratic culture it helped constitute, in part by confronting the audience with the otherwise unacknowledged principles of social exclusion that sustained its community. Euben makes his argument through a series of comparisons between three dramas (Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, and Euripides' Bacchae) and three works of classical political theory (Thucydides' History and Plato's Apology of Socrates and Republic) on the issues of justice, identity, and corruption. He brings his discussion to a contemporary American setting in a concluding chapter on Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in which the road from Argos to Athens, built to differentiate a human domain from the undefined outside, has become a Los Angeles freeway desecrating the land and its people in a predatory urban sprawl.

Twelve papers, some previously unpublished, concerned with Latin literature and literary theory are collected here. Abandoning unrealistic objectivity, they all advocate a 'postmodern' approach to critical theory.

Charlotte Brontë's final novel Villette (1853) is associated with ambiguity because of its open ending: Does M. Paul return to narrator-protagonist Lucy Snowe or is he killed in a storm raging on the Atlantic? Taking its famous ending as a starting point, this study explores Villette as a text in which ambiguity is all-pervasive in various ways. Among these is the narrator's ambivalent attitude toward herself and others, epitomised in her stylistic idiosyncrasies. The links between ambiguity and doubt are explored through an analysis of Lucy's signature phrase, "I know not," expressive of her existential doubts and questioning attitude toward the world. The analysis moreover focuses on the motif of the oracle as a traditionally ambiguous utterance, and explores its relevance in the context of the generic tradition of Villette as a fictional autobiography. Another focus is the interplay of figurative and literal levels of meaning in the allegorical episodes, creating ambiguity.