eBook PDF Download Digital Library
Author: J. M. Walton
Publisher: Praeger
Published: 1996-02-28
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An engaging introduction to the plays and dramatic method of the most highly regarded comic writer of the classical period.
Author: Susan Lape
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-01-10
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 1400825911
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system. Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.
Author: Antonis K. Petrides
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-11-06
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 1107068436
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book shows how both verbal and visual allusion position the plays of New Comedy within the context of contemporary polis culture.
Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2006-09-28
Total Pages: 383
ISBN-13: 0141959487
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From the fifth to the second century BC, innovative comedy drama flourished in Greece and Rome. This collection brings together the greatest works of Classical comedy, with two early Greek plays: Aristophanes' bold, imaginative Birds, and Menander's The Girl from Samos, which explores popular contemporary themes of mistaken identity and sexual misbehaviour; and two later Roman comic plays: Plautus' The Brothers Menaechmus - the original comedy of errors - and Terence's bawdy yet sophisticated double love-plot, The Eunuch. Together, these four plays demonstrate the development of Classical comedy, celebrating its richness, variety and extraordinary legacy to modern drama.
Author: Katherine Lever
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2022-04-26
Total Pages: 227
ISBN-13: 1000579271
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Originally published in 1956, this is a critical analysis of the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander studied in the context of the history of comedy, of the allied arts, and of contemporary life. Aristophanes and Menander are deservedly the most famous writers of Greek comedy. The extant comedies of Aristophanes are notable for wit, comical action, beautiful poetry, and the dramatization of such problems as health of mind and body, sex, money, government, law, religion, education, and drama, music and poetry. Menander portrays with delicate and sympathetic understanding a world in which the seeming evils of loss and discord eventually lead to the genuine goods of discovery and concord. The art of Aristophanes is critically examined in three chapters and that of Menander in one. For centuries Dionysos had been worshipped in a spirit of ecstasy which manifested itself in song, dance and the wearing of masks and costumes, pantomime, farce, and satire. The processes by which these diverse elements were developed and fused into the complex literary form of Old Comedy are the subject of the first three chapters. Aristophanes was not only pre-eminent as a writer of Old Comedy; he also participated in the transformation of Old Comedy into Middle Comedy, a curious and interesting dramatic form which is fully treated in the seventh chapter. In the last chapter the emergence of New Comedy is traced and the art of Menander criticized. The book ends with a brief indication of the various forms in which the spirit of Greek comedy had survived to the present day.
Author: Netta Zagagi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 218
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Menander (342 - 293 BC) was the greatest dramatist of Greek New Comedy, which has influenced the course of Western drama both in its realism and romanticism. And yet until a large part of his comedies came to light in papyri discovered in Egypt in 1908, his influence was exercised almost entirely through his Latin adapters, Plautus and Terence. This book offers an appreciation of Menander's work based on his own writings. It explores the many sides of Menander's dramatic art, emphasizing the versatality and originality of his plays, achieved both within and sometimes in the face of a well-established comic tradition and the conservative expectations of his audience.
Author: Menander
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2004-07-29
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 0141913479
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Menander (c. 341-291 BC) was the foremost innovator of Greek New Comedy, a dramatic style that moved away from the fantastical to focus upon the problems of ordinary Athenians. This collection contains the full text of 'Old Cantankerous' (Dyskolos), the only surviving complete example of New Comedy, as well as fragments from works including 'The Girl from Samos' and 'The Rape of the Locks', all of which are concerned with domestic catastrophes, the hazards of love and the trials of family life. Written in a poetic style regarded by the ancients as second only to Homer, these polished works - profoundly influential upon both Roman playwrights such as Plautus and Terence, and the wider Western tradition - may be regarded as the first true comedies of manners.
Author: Sebastiana Nervegna
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-04-25
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 110732825X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The comic playwright Menander was one of the most popular writers throughout antiquity. This book reconstructs his life and the legacy of his work until the end of antiquity employing a broad range of sources such as portraits, illustrations of his plays, papyri preserving their texts and inscriptions recording their public performances. These are placed within the context of the three social and cultural institutions which appropriated his comedy, thereby ensuring its survival: public theatres, dinner parties and schools. Dr Nervegna carefully reconstructs how each context approached Menander's drama and how it contributed to its popularity over the centuries. The resultant, highly illustrated, book will be essential for all scholars and students not just of Menander's comedy but, more broadly, of the history and iconography of the ancient theatre, ancient social history and reception studies.
Author: Sander M. Goldberg
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2014-01-13
Total Pages: 157
ISBN-13: 1472507827
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The discovery on papyrus of plays by Menander, the greatest writer of Greek New Comedy, at last makes possible an evaluation on his own terms of an ancient author who, through the adaptations of Plautus and Terence, profoundly influenced the course of western drama. The present study establishes a critical perspective for understanding the kind of comedy Menander wrote, his roots, the theatrical effects he sought, and the extent of his achievement. Chapters on the major plays analyse their techniques of construction and characterisation, suggesting both the strengths and the limitations of Menander's comic tradition. This study is based on the Oxford Greek text but cites all ancient authors in translation to open the discussion to a wider audience. An introductory chapter places the tradition of New Comedy in the history of drama, and modern parallels are drawn wherever helpful. It will therefore be of value to students of drama as well as to classicists.
Author: Martin Revermann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-06-12
Total Pages: 523
ISBN-13: 0521760283
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book provides a unique panorama of this challenging area of Greek literature, combining literary perspectives with historical issues and material culture.
