Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

by Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Janet Lloyd (Translator)

Overview

Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet are leaders in a contemporary French classical scholarship that has produced a stunning reconfiguration of Greek thought and literature. In this work, the authors present a disturbing and decidedly nonclassical reading of Greek tragedy that insists on its radical discontinuity with our own outlook and with our social, aesthetic, and psychological categories. Originally published in French in two volumes, this new single-volume edition includes revised essays from Volume I as well as the first English translation of Volume II.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780942299199
Publisher:	Zone Books
Publication date:	10/17/1990
Series:	Zone Books
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	1,132,149
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

The late Jean-Pierre Vernant was Professor of Comparative Study of Religions at the Collège de France in Paris.


Pierre Vidal-Naquet is Director of Studies and Professor of Sociology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.


Janet Lloyd is a translator and writer living in England.

What People are Saying About This

Times Literary Supplement

What is Dionysiac about Greek tragedy, Vernant suggests, and specific to the genre, is the 'otherness' of the hero, his belonging to an absent world that no longer exists, and the blurring and shifting of the boundaries between illusion and reality that result for the audience.... Myth and Tragedy is a book to be unreservedly welcome for its progressive unfolding of ideas which have proved consistently fertile in new perceptions.

Endorsement

What is Dionysiac about Greek tragedy, Vernant suggests, and specific to the genre, is the 'otherness' of the hero, his belonging to an absent world that no longer exists, and the blurring and shifting of the boundaries between illusion and reality that result for the audience.... Myth and Tragedy is a book to be unreservedly welcome for its progressive unfolding of ideas which have proved consistently fertile in new perceptions.

—Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

Myth and Tragedy is a book to be unreservedly welcome for its progressive unfolding of ideas which have proved consistently fertile in new perceptions and for thinking that is in the best sense individual as well as collective.

—Times Literary Supplement

What is Dionysiac about Greek tragedy, Vernant suggests, and specific to the genre, is the 'otherness' of the hero, his belonging to an absent world that no longer exists, and the blurring and shifting of the boundaries between illusion and reality that result for the audience.... Myth and Tragedy is a book to be unreservedly welcome for its progressive unfolding of ideas which have proved consistently fertile in new perceptions.

—Times Literary Supplement

Editorial Reviews

"What is Dionysiac about Greek tragedy, Vernant suggests, and specific to the genre, is the ‘otherness’ of the hero, his belonging to an absent world that no longer exists, and the blurring and shifting of the boundaries between illusion and reality that result for the audience from the enacted fictions of the tragic theatre…. Myth and Tragedy is a book to be unreservedly welcome for its progressive unfolding of ideas which have proved consistently fertile in new perceptions and for thinking that is in the best sense individual as well as collective."

Times Literary Supplement