| The Tragic Idea Contributor(s): Lambropoulos, Vassilis (Author), Cartledge, Paul (Editor), Braund, Susanna (Editor) |
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ISBN: 0715635581 ISBN-13: 9780715635582 Publisher: Bristol Classical Press OUR PRICE: $36.58 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: June 2006 Annotation: Today we attribute a tragic quality to many things - works, experiences, values, events - but we forget how modern this idea is. This book traces the rise of the tragic idea from early Romanticism to late Modernism. Focusing on succinct, major statements, it maps one of the most absorbing philosophical conversations in modernity: the debate about the tragic meaning of life. This conversation has crossed geographical, linguistic, ideological and religious borders to bring thinkers together in an inquiry into the inner contradictions of liberty. While originally the tragic idea stood for the conflict of freedom and necessity, it gradually absorbed other irreconcilable dialectical collisions. It turned tragedy from a genre into a problem for ethics, aesthetics, criticism, classics, politics, anthropology and psychology, to name but a few. Scholars in these fields today will be fascinated to find human responsibility caught in the tragic web of modern dilemmas. Classicists in particular will be intrigued by the story of how, over the last two centuries, tragedy has acquired a second, parallel life away from the stage. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Sociology - General |
| Dewey: 809.251 |
| Series: Classical Inter/Faces |
| Physical Information: 0.49" H x 6.08" W x 9.28" (0.55 lbs) 160 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: The often overlapping discourses of nationalism and imperialism, along with related ideas of social decline, have been central in 19th- and 20th-century Anglo-European views of the world. This book offers four readings of Latin literary texts to show that the templates for these 'modern' discourses were forged in their essentials by the early Roman imperial period. Each chapter follows the relevant rhetorical thread in works of Horace, Tacitus or Juvenal, comparing their strategies with the defining structures of modern nationalist or colonialist discourses. General rhetorical principles can be discerned, remarkably persistent across time and circumstances. Classicists will find something new in an approach that systematically analyses the rhetorical strategies that underlie Roman prototypes of these discourses while demonstrating how closely later incarnations follow them. |
Contributor Bio(s): Braund, Susanna: - Susanna Morton Braund is Professor of Latin Poetry and Its Reception at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She has published extensively on Roman satire, Latin epic poetry and Seneca, including for Bloomsbury The Roman Satirists and Their Masks (1998).Lambropoulos, Vassilis: - Vassilis Lambropoulos is C.P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek in Classical Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.Cartledge, Paul: - Paul Cartledge is A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University, UK, and a Fellow of Clare College. He has published extensively on Greek history over several decades, including The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece (1997, new edition 2002), Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past (2004, revised edition 2005), Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice (2009), and Democracy: A Life (2016). |