Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin

Performance, Reception, Iconography assembles twenty-three papers from an international group of scholars who engage with, and develop, the seminal work of Oliver Taplin. Oliver Taplin has for over three decades been at the forefront of innovation in the study of Greek literature, and of the Greek theatre, tragic and comic, in particular. The studies in this volume centre on three key areas - the performance of Greek literature, the interactions between literature and the visual realm of iconography, and the reception and appropriation of Greek literature, and of Greek culture more widely, in subsequent historical periods.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Performance: Explorations 1: Helene Foley: Generic Boundaries in Late Fifth-Century Athens 2: Ian Ruffell: Audience and Emotion in the Reception of Greek Drama 3: Mark Griffith: Greek Middle-Brow Drama (Something to do with Aphrodite?) 4: Peter Wilson: Costing the Dionysia 5: Barbara Kowalzig: Nothing to do with Demeter? Something to do with Sicily! Theatre and Society in the Early Fifth-Century West Performance: Epic 6: Oswyn Murray: The Odyssey as Performance Poetry 7: Adrian Kelly: Performance and Rivalry: Homer, Odysseus, and Hesiod 8: William Allan: Performing the Will of Zeus: The Dios boule and the Scope of Early Greek Epic Performance: Tragedy 9: Pat Easterling: Theatrical Furies: Thoughts on Eumenides 10: Martin Revermann: Aeschylus' Eumenides, Chronotopes, and the `Aetiological Mode' 11: Eric Csapo: Star Choruses: Eleusis, Orphism, and New Musical Imagery and Dance 12: Athena Kavoulaki: The Last Word: Ritual, Power, and Performance in Euripides' Hiketides 13: Froma I. Zeitlin: Intimate Relations: Children, Childbearing, and Parentage on the Euripidean Stage 14: Bernd Seidensticker: Character and Characterization in Greek Tragedy Performance: Comedy 15: Peter Brown: Scenes at the Door in Aristophanic Comedy 16: David Wiles: The Poetics of the Mask in Old Comedy Performance: Iconography 17: Robin Osborne: Putting Performance into Focus 18: Alfonso Moreno: The Greek Gem: A Token of Recognition 19: François Lissarague: Image and Representation in the Pottery of Magna Graecia Performance: Reception 20: Simon Goldhill: Wagner's Greeks: The Politics of Hellenism 21: Erika Fischer-Lichte: Resurrecting Ancient Greece in Nazi German: The Oresteia as Part of the Olympic Games in 1936 22: Edith Hall: Can the Odyssey ever be Tragic? Historical Perspectives on the Theatrical Realization of Greek Epic 23: Fiona Macintosh: An Oedipus for our Times? Yeats's Version of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos

About the Author :
Martin Revermann is Associate Professor in Classics and Theatre Studies at the University of Toronto. Peter Wilson is William Ritchie Professor of Classics at the University of Sydney.

Review :
Literary scholarship has sometimes been accused of turning a blind eye to the realities of politics and power, but this and other essays in Performance are keenly aware of the fact that drama, even when it becomes "classical" does not inhabit a world of its own, but remains open to fresh interpretations, even wilful exploration.