GOWARD, B.,
Telling Tragedy.
Duckworth, London, 2009. VI,214p. Paperback.Using recent narrative theory, this book explores the narrative strategies that sustain the complex relationship between the tragic poet and his sophisticated audience. It discusses how these sprawling stories were typically shaped by Aeschylus into dramatic form; and, once established, how these patterns were successively adapted, subverted, capped or ignored by Sophocles and Euripides in the annual attempt to recreate suspense and express fresh meanings relevant to the difficult last decades of the fifth century. (Publisher's information). The value of the book lies elsewhere: in the detailed analysis of individual plays and scenes. The section devoted to Aeschylus (part 2) focuses on time. G. offers a very valuable discussion of delay and analeptic / proleptic devices hidden in prophecies and dreams, with a detaild analysis of scenes from Septem, Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound. Part 3, devoted to Sophocles, introduces what G. calls the 'narrative loop', a particular version of dolos: 'when Sophocles makes a temporary deviation from a plot line, rejoining it again later at the point of exit' (p.87). (…) The fourth part seems to me to be the most successful. This is no coincidence, perhaps, since Euripides comes close to displaying the authorial heavy-handedness of novelistic fictional narrative in a number of ways. (…) An important contribution (…). Students of Greek tragedy (and drama in general (…) will (…) benefit from it.' (CHIARA TUMIGER in The Journal of Hellenic Studies 2005, p.164).
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