Self-Representation and Illusion in Senecan Tragedy

by C. A. J. Littlewood

Overview

A. J. Littlewood approaches Seneca's tragedies as Neronian literature rather than as reworkings of Attic drama, and emphasizes their place in the Roman world and in the Latin literary corpus. The Greek tragic myths are for Seneca mediated by non-dramatic Augustan literature. In literary terms Phaedra's desire, Hippolytus' innocence, and Hercules' ambivalent heroism look back through allusion to Roman elegy, pastoral, and epic respectively. Ethically, the artificiality of Senecan tragedy, the consciousness that its own dramatic worlds, events, and people are literary constructs, responds to the contemporary Stoical dismissal of the public world as mere theatre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199267613
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/03/2004
Series:	Oxford Classical Monographs
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Cedric Littlewood is Assistant Professor of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction2. The broken world3. Images of a flawed technical genesis4. Meta-theatre and self-consciousness5. Phaedra: intertextuality and innocence