University of Wisconsin Press Tragic Rites: Narrative and Ritual in Sophoclean Drama (Wisconsin Studies in Classics)

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 themAjax, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonusin 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. About the Author Adriana Brook is an assistant professor in the Department of Classics at Lawrence University.