This book examines one of the most radical and precipitous instances in the shift in interpretation and evolution of literary works and their authors. Specifically, it focuses on the 'rehabilitation' of Euripides in the late nineteenth century, includingthe crucial role played by the classicist and English scholar A. W. Verrall.

On Germans and Other GreeksTragedy and Ethical LifeDennis J. SchmidtWhat Greek tragedy and German philosophy reveal about the meaning of art for ethical life."Schmidt’s investigation of tragedy is a highly significant, powerful work, one with far-reaching consequences. It bears on our understanding of the role of the arts and of philosophical thinking in our culture." ―Rodolphe GaschéIn this illuminating work, Dennis J. Schmidt examines tragedy as one of the highest forms of human expression for both the ancients and the moderns. While uncovering the specifically Greek nature of tragedy as an exploration of how to live an ethical life, Schmidt’s elegant and penetrating readings of Greek texts show that it was the beauty of Greek tragic art that led Kant and other German thinkers to appreciate the relationship between tragedy and ethics. The Germans, however, gave this relationship a distinctly German interpretation. Through the Greeks, the Germans reflected on the enigmas of ethical life and asked innovative questions about how to live an ethical life outside of the typical assumptions and restrictions of traditional Western metaphysics. Schmidt’s engagements with Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger show how German philosophical appropriations of Greek tragedy conceived of ethics as moving beyond the struggle between good and evil toward the discovery of community truths. Enlisting a wide range of literary and philosophical texts, some translated into English for the first time, Schmidt reveals that contemporary notions of tragedy, art, ethics, and truth are intimately linked to the Greeks.Dennis J. Schmidt is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. He is author of The Ubiquity of the Finite and translator of Ernst Bloch’s Natural Law and Human Dignity.Studies in Continental Thought―John Sallis, general editor May 2001432 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, bibl., indexcloth 0-253-33868-9 $49.95 L / £38.00paper 0-253-21443-2 $24.95 s / £18.95 (view table of contents)

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Psychoanalytic readings of literature are often reductionist, seeking to find in great works of the past support for current psychoanalytic tenets. In this book C. Fred Alford begins with the possibility that the insights into human needs and aspirations contained in Greek tragedy might be more profound than psychoanalytic theory. He offers his own psychoanalytic interpretation of the tragedies, one that reconstructs the dramatists' views of the world and, when necessary, enlarges psychoanalysis to take these views into account.Alford draws on an eclectic mixture of psychoanalytic theories―in particular the work of Melanie Klein, Robert Jay Lifton, and Jacques Lacan―to help him illuminate the concerns of the Greek poets. He discusses not only well-known tragedies, such as Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, Sophocles' Theban plays, and Euripides' Medea and Bacchae, but also lesser-known works, such as Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' so-called romantic comedies. Alford examines the fundamental concerns of the tragedies: how to live in a world in which justice and power often seem to have nothing to do with each other; how to confront death; how to deal with the fear that our aggression will overflow and violate all that we care about; how to make this inhumane world a more human place. Two assumptions of the tragic poets could, he argues, enrich psychoanalysis―that people are responsible without being free, and that pity is the most civilizing connection. The poets understood these things, Alford believes, because they never flinched in the face of the suffering and constraint that are at the center of human existence.