Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium

Greek tragedy is currently being performed more frequently than at any time since classical antiquity. This book is the first to address the fundamental question, why has there been so much Greek tragedy in the theatres, opera houses and cinemas of the last three decades? A detailed chronological appendix of production information and lavish illustrations supplement the fourteen essays by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from the worlds of classics, theatre studies, and the professional theatre. They relate the recent appeal of Greek tragedy to social trends, political developments, aesthetic and performative developments, and the intellectual currents of the last three decades, especially multiculturalism, post-colonialism, feminism, post-structuralism, revisions of psychoanalytical models, and secularization.

Table of Contents:
1: Edith Hall: Introduction: Why Greek tragedy since the late 1960s? 1. Dionysus and the Sex War 2: Froma Zeitlin: Dionysus in '69 3: Helene Foley: Bad women: gender politics in late twentieth-century performance and revision of Greek tragedy 4: Kathleen Riley: Heracles as Dr Strangelove and GI Joe: male heroism deconstructed 2. Dionysus in Politics 5: Oliver Taplin: Sophocles' Philoctetes, Seamus Heaney's, and some other recent half-rhymes 6: Edith Hall: Aeschylus, race, class, and war in the 1990s 7: Pantelis Michelakis: Greek tragedy in cinema: theatre, politics, history 8: Lorna Hardwick: Greek drama and anti-colonialism: decolonising Classics 3. Dionysus and the Aesthetics of Performance 9: David Wiles: The use of masks in modern performances of Greek tragedy 10: Katharine Worth: Greek notes in Samuel Beckett's theatre art 11: Peter Brown: Greek Tragedy in late twentieth-century opera 4. Dionysus and the Life of the Mind 12: Fiona Macintosh: Oedipus in the East End: from Freus to Berkoff 13: Erika Fischer-Lichte: Thinking about the origins of theatre in the 1970s 14: Timberlake Wertenbaker: The voices we hear 15: Amanda Wrigley: Details of productions discussed

About the Author :
Edith Hall is Leverhulme Professor of Greek Cultural History at the University of Durham and Co-Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford Fiona Macintosh is Senior Research Fellow at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford Amanda Wrigley is Researcher at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford

Review :
...a major contribution to the year's work Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory ...reveals a wealth of understanding concerning the ways Greek tragedy has been read, received, interpreted and shared in recent decades, and points the way forward to other studies in this ever-increasing field. C.W. Marshall, The Classical Review The quality of the contributions is uniformly high ... The range of methods is appealingly wide, providing readers with fascinating material ... Collectively, the volume gives an extremely stimulating up-to-date account of Greek tragedy in the last thirty or forty years ... deserves a wide readership ... The writing is accessible; illustrations are well selected ... index and bibliography are very detailed. The Journal of Classics Teaching