Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy

Description

This volume explores how the choruses of Greek tragedy creatively combined media and discourses to generate their own specific forms of meaning. The contributors analyse choruses as fictional, religious and civic performers; as combinations of text, song and dance; and as objects of reflection in themselves, in relation and contrast to the choruses of comedy and melic poetry. Drawing on earlier analyses of the social context of Greek drama, the non-textual dimensions of tragedy, and the relations between dramatic and melic choruses, the chapters explore the uses of various analytic tools in allowing us better to capture the specificity of the tragic chorus. Special attention is given to the physicality of choral dancing, musical interactions between choruses and actors, the trajectories of reception, and the treatment of time and space in the odes.

Renaud Gagne is a University Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. His main research interests are early Greek poetry and Greek religion. He is a co-editor of Sacrifices humains. Perspectives croisees et representations (2013) and the author of Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2013). Marianne Govers Hopman is Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, Illinois, where she specialises in ancient Greek and Latin poetry and mythology. Her publications include articles on Homer, Greek tragedy, Greek hymns and Roman satire, and a book, Scylla: Myth, Metaphor, Paradox (2013).

'Excellent ... offers a sophisticated exploration of both the richness and the strangeness of the chorus as a phenomenon of ancient Greek culture.' The Times Literary Supplement '... the elasticity of [its] approach allows the book to offer sixteen diverse but uniformly rich essays that show how the chorus is a mediating figure for scholarly interests as much as it was a figure of shifting meanings on the Athenian stage for its inventors, performers, and observers.' Sarah Nooter, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 'This excellent volume occupies a distinctive place within the growing body of scholarship on the Greek chorus. It will be of great interest to scholars working on Greek tragedy and on ancient performance culture more broadly.' Lauren Curtis, The Classical Journal