Euripides' Women

The complex and often controversial female characters of Euripidean tragedy have long attracted critical attention and creative engagement. In Euripides' Women, Sarah Olsen enriches our understanding of these figures by focusing on their relationships with one another. Attending to scenes of female intimacy, she argues that these encounters invite audiences to imagine alternatives to the lives and narratives unfolding within a given play. Through readings of Helen, Andromache, Hecuba, Hippolytus, Phoenician Women, and Trojan Women, Olsen traces how such moments generate new trajectories within and across familiar mythic and dramatic traditions. Combining queer and feminist perspectives with literary and performance-based modes of analysis, Euripides' Women identifies female relationships as a vital source of imaginative and theatrical possibility in Greek tragedy.