Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance

Examines the centrality of Greek tragedy for modernist performanceThis book explores how encounters between modernist theatre makers and Greek tragedy were constitutive in modernist experiments in performance. It analyses the experiments of Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon Craig, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, H. D., and Bertolt Brecht in creating a modernist aesthetic in performing, dancing, translating, and designing Greek tragedies, sometimes for the stage and sometimes for the page. The book proposes a modernist aesthetic of Greek tragedy based on Hellenism as theatricality that radically revises the philosophical discourses of tragedy.Olga Taxidou is Professor of Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Edinburgh.