Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Greek Tragedy 1970-2005

The monograph presents an inquiry into the interface between Greek tragedy and major theoretical investigations of the last decades, focusing on adaptations of the Greek tragic plays produced from 1970 to 2005. These recent adaptations of Greek tragedy are characterised by an extended intertextual engagement with their prototypes, which involves both a different treatment of the classical text and a radical turn in the perception of the tragic genre. Instead of simply adapting the Greek myth, these recent plays rewrite their source texts in ways which evoke the renegotiation of textuality proffered by the theory of poststructuralism. The book argues that a similar contemplation of the tragic text is intrinsically linked to the wider problematics tackled in these plays, such as the feminist and postcolonial revisiting of the classical canon. The dramatic corpus under examination indeed uncovers a significant dialogue between tragedy and postmodern aesthetics, while also suggesting that the genre of tragedy is precisely the plane upon which the contested ethics of postmodernism can be re-evaluated.