The City as Comedy
Society and Representation in Athenian Drama
Edited by Gregory W. Dobrov
375 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-4645-2
Published: February 1998 -
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6888-6
Published: October 2017 -
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-3946-8
Published: October 2017
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Applying a variety of critical approaches to Athenian comedy, these essays are grouped around three broad categories: utopianism, fissures in the social fabric, and the new polis of fourth-century comedy. The contributors explore the sociopolitical and material contexts of the works discussed and trace the genre into the fourth century, when it underwent profound changes. Simultaneously a study of classical Greek literature and an analysis of cultural production, this collection reveals how for two centuries Athens itself was transformed, staged as comedy, and, ultimately, shaped by contemporary material, social, and ideological forces.
The contributors are Elizabeth Bobrick, Gregory Crane, Gregory Dobrov, Malcolm Heath, Jeffrey Henderson, Timothy P. Hofmeister, Thomas K. Hubbard, David Konstan, Heinz-GÃ…nther Nesselrath, Frank Romer, Ralph M. Rosen, Niall W. Slater, and John Wilkins.
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About the Author
Gregory Dobrov is assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago. His books include Figures of Play and Beyond Aristophanes.
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Reviews
"In this high aerial survey of Athenian comedy Dobrov's scholarly chorus wings us challengingly past the old polarities of political satire and unpolitical fantasy. The polis is always there, and always reimagined: a new comic creation with its own laws of being, yet rooted in historical realities, dilemmas, and paradoxes that seem, for all their otherness, oddly familiar. Fasten your seat belts securely before you start reading!"--Kenneth J. Reckford, author of Aristophanes' Old-and-New Comedy