Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning

Olga Taxidou is Professor Emerita of Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and Visiting Professor at New York University. She is the author of The Mask: a Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (1998, 2001), Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (2004), Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (2007) and Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance: Hellenism as Theatricality (2021). She is co-editor of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (1998), Post-War Cinema and Modernity: a Film Reader (2000) and The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism (2018).

'Taxidou has written an exceptionally challenging and thought-provoking book. Her scope is extensive, questioning the very meaning of tragedy itself!T[axidou]'s exciting new readings provide an excellent basis for scholars to further exploit this interesting research area The most persuasive and far-reaching alternative approach to Greek tragedy that we have. -- Liana Theodoratou Much of what is so impressive in Taxidou's argument has to do with the ways in which, through a series of meticulously close readings of Athenian tragedy, she revises our understanding of these plays but also our understanding of the modernist project in all its contradictions. -- Eduardo Cadava The book's central arguments are for an understanding of Greek tragedy as a structure of performance linked to mourning and the feminine, and deeply shaped by tensions in the homosocial structure of Greek thought with its dependence on the repression of a 'monstrous' feminine!Taxidou engages deeply with psychoanalysis and brings a consistently challenging feminist perspective to philosophical debates. -- John Frow 'Taxidou has written an exceptionally challenging and thought-provoking book. Her scope is extensive, questioning the very meaning of tragedy itself!T[axidou]'s exciting new readings provide an excellent basis for scholars to further exploit this interesting research area The most persuasive and far-reaching alternative approach to Greek tragedy that we have. Much of what is so impressive in Taxidou's argument has to do with the ways in which, through a series of meticulously close readings of Athenian tragedy, she revises our understanding of these plays but also our understanding of the modernist project in all its contradictions. The book's central arguments are for an understanding of Greek tragedy as a structure of performance linked to mourning and the feminine, and deeply shaped by tensions in the homosocial structure of Greek thought with its dependence on the repression of a 'monstrous' feminine!Taxidou engages deeply with psychoanalysis and brings a consistently challenging feminist perspective to philosophical debates.

• Contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1.The Allure of Antigone or Antigone and the Philosophers; 2. Oedipus/Anti-Oedipus: the Philosopher, the Actor and the Patient; 3.Trauerspiel, Tragedy and Epic; 4. Euripides and Aristotle: Friends in Mourning; 5. The Heroism of Hercules and the Beauty of Helen; 6. Mourning and Tragic Form; 7. Brecht, Beckett, Müller: Modern Tragedy and Engagement.