Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides - Paperback

$17.95
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Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides
  • Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides
Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides - Paperback

Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides - Paperback

by Euripides
$17.95
$17.95

Book Overview

Now in paperback.

Euripides, the last of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens, reached the height of his renown during the disastrous Peloponnesian War, when democratic Athens was brought down by its own outsized ambitions. "Euripides," the classicist Bernard Knox has written, "was born never to live in peace with himself and to prevent the rest of mankind from doing so." His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerless-women and children, slaves and barbarians-for whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending. Euripides' plays rarely won first prize in the great democratic competitions of ancient Athens, but their combustible mixture of realism and extremism fascinated audiences throughout the Greek world. In the last days of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian prisoners held captive in far-off Sicily were said to have won their freedom by reciting snatches of Euripides' latest tragedies.

Four of those tragedies are presented here in new translations by the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson. They are Herakles, in which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family; Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, in which Hektor's widow takes vengeance on her Greek captors; Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love; and the strange tragic-comedy fable Alkestis, which tells of a husband who arranges for his wife to die in his place. The volume also contains brief introductions by Carson to each of the plays along with two remarkable framing essays: "Tragedy: A Curious Art Form" and "Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra."
ISBN9781590172537
Author Euripides
PublisherNew York Review of Books
GenreLiterature and Drama
FormatPaperback
PublishedSeptember 2008
LanguageENG- English
Pages312
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Drama Nonfiction Poetry

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About Euripides

Caroline Bird has been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize twice & has also won an Eric Gregory Award (2002), the Foyle Young Poet of the Year award two years running (1999, 2000), was a winner of the Poetry London Competition in 2007, and the Peterloo Poetry Competition in 2004, 2003 and 2002. Caroline was on the shortlist for Shell Woman Of The Future Awards 2011. Caroline's poems have been published in several anthologies, including Oxford Poetry 2008, and are published regularly in PN Review, Poetry Review, The North magazine. A member of the Royal Court Young Writers Programme, Caroline is also a playwright. In 2011, Caroline's contribution was included in Bush Theatre's project Sixty-Six Books.

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