Author: Carl Arne Anderson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780472074457
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A disruptive comedy by a disruptive playwright

Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Faenum Publishing, Limited
ISBN: 9781940997957
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
This volume presents the Greek text of Aristophanes' Knights, as edited by F. W. Hall and W. M. Geldart, with a parallel verse translation by Ian Johnston on facing pages, which will be useful to those wishing to read the English translation while referring to the Greek original, or vice versa.

Author: Aristophanes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Greek drama
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description

Author: Robert C. Bartlett
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520344103
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Against Demagogues presents Robert C. Bartlett's new translations of Aristophanes' most overtly political works, the Acharnians and the Knights. In these fantastically inventive, raucous, and raunchy comedies, the powerful politician Cleon proves to be democracy's greatest opponent. With unrivalled power, both plays make clear the dangers to which democracies are prone, especially the threats posed by external warfare, internal division, and class polarization. Combating the seductive allure of demagogues and the damage they cause, Against Demagogues disentangles Aristophanes' serious teachings from his many jokes and pratfalls, substantiating for modern readers his famous claim to "teach justice" while "making a comedy" of the city. The book features an interpretive essay for each play, expertly guiding readers through the most important plot points, explaining the significance of various characters, and shedding light on the meaning of the plays' often madcap episodes. Along with a contextualizing introduction, Bartlett offers extensive notes explaining the many political, literary, and religious references and allusions. Aristophanes' comedic skewering of the demagogue and his ruthless ambition—and of a community so ill-informed about the doings of its own government, so ready to believe in empty promises and idle flattery—cannot but resonate strongly with readers today around the world.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description

Author: Marina Marren
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810144204
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In Plato and Aristophanes, Marina Marren contends that our search for communal justice must start with self-examination. The realization that there are things that we cannot know about ourselves unless we become the subject of a joke is integral to such self-scrutiny. Jokes provide a new perspective on our politics and ethics; they are essential to our civic self-awareness. Marren makes this case by delving into Plato’s Republic, a foundational work of political philosophy. While the Republic straightforwardly condemns the decadence and greed of a tyrant, Plato’s attack on political idealism is both solemn and comedic. In fact, Plato draws on the same comedic stock and tropes as do Aristophanes’s plays. Marren’s book strikes up an innovative conversation between three works by Aristophanes—Assembly Women, Knights, and Birds—and Plato’s philosophy, prompting important questions about individual convictions and one’s personal search for justice. These dialogic works offer critiques of tyranny that are by turns brilliant, scathing, and exuberant, making light of faults and ideals alike. Philosophical comedy exposes despotism in individuals as well as systems of government claiming to be just and good. This critique holds as much bite against contemporary injustices as it did at the time of Aristophanes and Plato. An ingenious new work by an emerging scholar, Plato and Aristophanes shows that comedy—in tandem with philosophy and politics—is essential to self-examination. And without such examination, there is no hope for a just life.

Author: Aristophanes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Lysistrata (Fictitious character)
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description

Author: Ralph M. Rosen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004424466
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The essays in this volume explore the many aspects of the “political” in the plays of Greek comic dramatist Aristophanes (5th century BCE), posing a variety of questions and approaching them through diverse methodological lenses. They demonstrate that “politics” as reflected in Aristophanes’ plays remains a fertile, and even urgent, area of inquiry, as political developments in our own time distinctly color the ways in which we articulate questions about classical Athens. As this volume shows, the earlier scholarship on politics in (or “and”) Aristophanes, which tended to focus on determining Aristophanes’ “actual” political views, has by now given way to approaches far more sensitive to how comic literary texts work and more attentive to the complexities of Athenian political structures and social dynamics. All the studies in this volume grapple to varying degrees with such methodological tensions, and show, that the richer and more diverse our political readings of Aristophanes can become, the less stable and consistent, as befits a comic work, they appear to be.

Author: Michael Vickers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Since the eighteenth century, classical scholars have generally agreed that the Greek playwright Aristophanes did not as a matter of course write "political" plays. Yet, according to an anonymous Life of Aristophanes, when Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse wanted to know about the government of Athens, Plato sent him a copy of Aristophanes' Clouds. In this boldly revisionist work, Michael Vickers convincingly argues that in his earlier plays, Aristophanes in fact commented on the day-to-day political concerns of Athenians. Vickers reads the first six of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays in a way that reveals the principal characters to be based in large part on Pericles and his ward Alcibiades. According to Vickers, the plays of Aristophanes—far from being nonpolitical—actually allow us to gauge the reaction of the Athenian public to the events that followed Pericles' death in 429 B.C., to the struggle for the political succession, and to the problems presented by Alcibiades' emergence as one of the most powerful figures in the state. This view of Aristophanes reaffirms the central role of allegory in his work and challenges all students of ancient Greece to rethink long-held assumptions about this important playwright.

Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1625580630
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
A rollicking attack on war-makers, the farmer-hero makes his famous trip to heaven on a dung beetle to discuss the issues with Zeus.