Tragic Rites

Narrative and Ritual in Sophoclean Drama

Adriana E. Brook

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780299313838
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Presenting an innovative new reading of Sophocles' plays, Tragic Rites analyzes the poetic and narrative function of ritual in the seven extant plays of Sophocles. Adriana Brook closely examines four of them— Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonu s—in the context of her wide-ranging consideration of the entire Sophoclean corpus. Exploring the playwright's dramatic technique, she shows how he used elements of ritual to guide the perceptions and expectations of his fifth-century audience about plot and character.Employing both modern ritual theory and Aristotle's Poetics, Brook exposes the deep structural analogies between ritual and narrative, the parallels between mistakes in ritual and deviations from the expected in the plot, and the relationship between ritual content and dramatic closure.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translations and Sources
• Introduction: Ritual Poetics in the Plays of Sophocles
• 1. Normative Rituals and Ritual Mistakes in the Antigone, Trachiniae, and Oedipus Tyrannus
• 2. Ritual Conflation in the Ajax
• 3. Ritual Repetition in the Electra
• 4. Ritual Status in the Philoctetes
• 5. Supplication in the Oedipus at Colonus
• Conclusion: Ritual and Closure
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index