Tragedy's End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama - Hardcover

Dunn, Francis M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019508344X ISBN 13: 9780195083446

Publisher: OUP USA, 1996

Synopsis

Francis Dunn explores the novel gestures that close the dramas of Euripides, showing how these deny access to an authoritative reading of the plays, reinforce innovations in plot and structure, and open up tragedy to comic, parodic, and narrative impulses. The author provides the first large-scale study of closure in classical literature, and includes readings of plot, ending, and generic innovation in Hyppolytus, Trojan women, Hercules, and the late plays Helen, Orestes, and Phoenician Women.

About this title

About the Author

Francis Dunn is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

From the Back Cover

Euripides is a notoriously problematic and controversial playwright whose innovations, according to Nietzsche, brought Greek tragedy to an early death. Francis Dunn here argues that the infamous and artificial endings in Euripides deny the viewer access to a stable or authoritative reading of the play, while innovations in plot and ending opened tragedy up to a medley of comic, parodic, and narrative impulses. Part One explores the dramatic and metadramatic uses of novel closing gestures, such as aetiology, closing prophecy, exit lines of the chorus, and deus ex machina. Part Two shows how experimentation in plot and ending reinforce one another in Hippolytus, Trojan Women, and Heracles. Part Three argues that in three late plays, Helen, Orestes, and Phoenician Women, Euripides devises radically new and untragic ways of representing and understanding human experience. Tragedy's End is the first comprehensive study of closure in classical tragedy, and will be of interest to students and scholars of classical literature, drama, and comparative literature.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP USA
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019508344X
• ISBN 13: 9780195083446
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264