Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to MiltonJohns Hopkins University Press, 2004 - 289 Seiten In Paradise Lost, Adam asks, "Why do I overlive?" Adam's anguished question is the basis for a critical analysis of living too long as a neglected but central theme in Western tragic literature. Emily Wilson examines this experience in works by Milton and by four of his literary predecessors: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, and Shakespeare. Each of these writers composed works in which the central character undergoes unbearable suffering or loss, hopes for death, but goes on living. Mocked with Death makes clear that tragic works need not find their moral and aesthetic conclusion in death and that, in some instances, tragedy consists of living on rather than dying. Oedipus's survival at the end of Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus Coloneus is clearly one such instance; another Euripides' Heracles. In Seneca's Hercules Furens, overliving becomes an expression of anxieties about both political and literary belatedness. In King Lear and Macbeth, the sense of overliving produces a divided sense of self. For Milton, in both Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost, overliving is a theological problem arising from the tension between mortal conceptions of time and divine providence. Each writer in this tradition, Wilson concludes, attempts to diminish the anxieties arising from living past one's time but cannot entirely minimize them. Tragedies of overliving remain disturbing because they remind us that life is rarely as neat as we expect and hope it be and that endings often come too late. |
Im Buch
Ergebnisse 1-3 von 71
... says , not " here's hell . " But he cannot escape from either his own body or those of others ; the burdens of physical life implicate everyone in the play . Lear repeatedly imagines that his end has come , and repeatedly he turns out ...
... says in chapter 13 that the best kind of plot structure is that from good fortune to bad , while in chapter 14 he says that it is best of all when , as in the Cresphontes , a terrible action is threatened but not performed , due to a ...
... says , " Break , heart , I prithee break " ( 5.3.313 ) , speaking both of Lear's heart and his own ; in the Quarto , the line is ascribed to Lear himself . 59. Albany says to Edgar , " Let sorrow split my heart , if ever I / Did hate ...
Inhalt
Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus | 24 |
Oedipus Coloneus | 41 |
Euripides Heracles | 66 |
Urheberrecht | |
8 weitere Abschnitte werden nicht angezeigt.
Andere Ausgaben - Alle anzeigen
Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton Emily R. Wilson Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2004 |