Sophocles

Frederic Will

Bernard Knox

Each volume in a collection of affordable, readable editions of some of the world's greatest works of literature features a chronology of the author's life and career, a concise introduction containing valuable background information, a timeline of significant events, an outline of key plot points and themes, detailed explanatory notes, critical analyses, discussion questions, and a list of recommended books and films.

Oedipus the King

An African Marriage

Flesh and the Color of Love

Is Ancient Greece still meaningful to the twenty-first-century world? The vitality of the classical tradition, which has been a long-enduring and important element in our culture, is the concern of the seven scholars who in this book present their answers to this question. In various ways their essays support editor Frederic Will's statement that the "complex and mature group of awarenesses" embodied in the classical tradition still help to maintain the continuity of human culture, thus sharing in the unbroken process of developing a Western civilization. These awarenesses are not self-perpetuating but must be sustained by the guardians of tradition—schools, literary creators and critics, libraries, and scholars. In this book, particular attention is devoted to the literary creators. In discussing the impact of Greek myth, Greek literature, and Greek philosophy on modern writers, the present essayists try to determine how alive Greek classical culture is today, how meaningful it is, and how it can be perpetuated. Through their presentations in these seven essays, the contributors prove that the tradition does not suffer from lack of able guardians. These studies in the interpretation of literature and thought afford stimulating evidence that the classical tradition is still alive in our modern age.

Seven Essays on the Modern Experience of the Classical

Hereditas

This collection of film profiles, comprising 37 discussions, covers a variety of films from the twentieth century. It will appeal to a wide reading audience interested in exploring the relevance of films to literature, and culture more broadly. At the same time, the films under consideration are viewed as moves in mind, by which we trade with one another the look of things brought to presence by the shocking directness of eyesight.

Film and the Heat of Life

This book will serve to help the reader of Shakespeare’s plays by providing an introduction to the various literary critical issues that this great writer regularly generates. The ‘help rendered’ is largely referential, reminding the reader who said what and thought what at which point within the plays. Some of the critical issues discussed include: What is the secret of the rounded Shakespearean character (for instance, Falstaff)? What is a problem play, and what kind of philosophical arguments does Shakespeare introduce in such plays? What is the value of Shakespeare’s perspective for thinking effectively in our world now?

Shakespeare as a Portable Guide to the Human Condition

Shamans in Turtlenecks

Homer

Homer's great epic describes the many adventures of Odysseus, Greek warrior, as he strives over many years to return to his home island of Ithaca after the Trojan War. His colourful adventures, his endurance, his love for his wife and son have the same power to move and inspire readers today as they did in Archaic Greece, 2800 years ago.

The Odyssey

This volume represents a study in the formation of a personal literary opus, and in some of the theoretical reflections involved in understanding how parts of that opus are constructed. The opus in question is the author’s own, and he is the analyst of it, attempting in this role to work as an everyman stand-in, a representative of the I in each of us which can choose to live the situation of replacing itself by writing. The opus is addressed by pieces of individual text – a chapter each from a couple of novels and a long poem – and by a close pursuit of the kinds of ways in which the author is transformed into those pieces of text. This textbook in democratic self-transformation is at the same time a fussy tractatus on the intricacies imposed on itself by art, in its quest to become a zone of moral enhancement.

Replaced by Writing

The Modernist Impulse and a Contemporary Opus

This volume presents an autobiography of one writer’s existence in poetry, the tracks left by a clumsy bear taming himself in public; it is also a forum in which to act out and discover oneself. It will serve to light fires, the can-do drive others can surpass, finding in themselves language as daring as their lives, and more daring than the author’s. It endeavours to allow every reader of this text to leave it feeling better, more able to do things by him- or herself, and more convinced that poetry is essential to a good life. The text itself is the eighth title in the 10-volume series Inside Selfhood and History.

An Anatomy of Poetic Character

Downloading the Poetic Self

Poetry and Philosophy as Handlung offers a series of verbal â oedoing itsâ in which there is significant complicity between sentences, but plenty of dissonance to slip in the spices that define the peculiar aroma of the era at hand. For that reason, a tactical sequence accords literary space for time and place to herald themselves, for the temporal feel to remain prominent. For a tactical sequence to take place, all that is required is the transcurrence of a textâ (TM)s language, for the text to be open and not to prejudice even its own immediate future.

Frederic Will

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