Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought

Description

Dionysus after Nietzsche examines the way that The Birth of Tragedy (1872) by Friedrich Nietzsche irrevocably influenced twentieth-century literature and thought. Adam Lecznar argues that Nietzsche's Dionysus became a symbol of the irrational forces of culture that cannot be contained, and explores the presence of Nietzsche's Greeks in the diverse writings of Jane Harrison, D. H. Lawrence, Martin Heidegger, Richard Schechner and Wole Soyinka (amongst others). From Jane Harrison's controversial ideas about Greek religion in an anthropological modernity, to Wole Soyinka's reimagining of a postcolonial genre of tragedy, each of the writers under discussion used the Nietzschean vision of Greece to develop subversive discourses of temporality, identity, history and classicism. In this way, they all took up Nietzsche's call to disrupt pre-existing discourses of classical meaning and create new modes of thinking about the Classics that speak to the immediate concerns of the present.

Adam Lecznar is a research fellow in the Department of Greek and Latin at University College London. His work is concerned with understanding the way that modern experience, knowledge and ideas have been formed in a lively dialogue with the texts and authors of ancient Greece and Rome. Alongside writing various essays on continental media theory, Nietzsche, James Joyce and Alejo Carpentier, Lecznar has also recently co-edited a path-breaking collection on Classicisms in the Black Atlantic which examines the way that the ancient Greek and Roman pasts have become interconnected with modern discourses of race and identity.

'L.'s volume is a rare book because of the excellence of his ideas and the quality of research and writing. It masterfully shows how our life is shaped by modernity's appropriation of an ancient Greek heritage ... The scholarship is stellar throughout ... The book enters as a sharp-sighted contribution into the field of literature on modernity and its relationship to the ancient Greeks.' Marina Marren, The Classical Review 'The scholarly rigour of Dionysus after Nietzsche, and the painstaking research evidenced throughout, mark it out as a vital addition to existing work on the interactions between ancient and modern literature. This book will be of keen interest to all students and researchers of classical reception, especially tragedy, as well as those of modern literature, philosophy, and social theory, in addition to the interested general reader.' Samuel Agbamu, Rhea Classical Reviews