Sophocles' tragic world
Subtitle: divinity, nature, society
By: Charles Segal.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 276
Subjects: Sophocles -- Criticism and interpretation; Religious drama, Greek -- History and criticism; Literature and society -- Greece; Mythology, Greek, in literature; Gods, Greek, in literature; Nature in literature; Tragedy
Description: Much has been written about the heroic figures of Sophocles' powerful dramas. Now Charles Segal focuses our attention not on individual heroes and heroines, but on the world that inspired and motivated their actions - a universe of family, city, nature, and the supernatural. He shows how these ancient masterpieces offer insight into the abiding question of tragedy: how one can make sense of a world that involves so much apparently meaningless violence and suffering.

In a series of engagingly written interconnected essays, Segal studies five of Sophocles' seven extant plays: Ajax, Oedipus Tyrannus, Philoctetes, Antigone, and the often neglected Trachinian Women. He examines the language and structure of the plays from several interpretive perspectives, drawing both on traditional philological analysis and on current literary and cultural theory.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.