Description
Book SynopsisAs both a literary genre and a view of life, tragedy has from the very beginning spurred a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Plato famously banned tragedians from his ideal community because he believed that their representations of vicious behavior could deform minds. Aristotle set out to answer Plato''s objections, arguing that fiction offers a faithful image of the truth and that it promotes emotional health through the mechanism of catharsis. Aristotle''s definition of tragedy actually had its greatest impact not on Greek tragedy itself but on later Latin literature, beginning with the tragedies of the Roman poet and Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BC - AD 65). Scholarship over the last fifty years, however, has increasingly sought to identify in Seneca''s prose writings a Platonic poetics which is antagonistic toward tragedy and which might therefore explain why Seneca''s plays seem so often to present the failure of Stoicism. As Gregory Staley argues in this book, when Senecan
Trade ReviewImpressive and stimulating * William Fitzgerald. Times Literary Supplement *
a valuable addition to the debate concerning the relationship between Seneca's tragedies and his philosophic works. * Christopher Star, Journal of Roman Studies *
Table of ContentsPREFACE; ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS; ABBREVIATIONS; INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY; CONCLUSION: STOIC TRAGEDY; NOTES; BIBLIOGRAPHY; INDEX
