Performance, Iconography, Reception

Martin Revermann is Associate Professor in Classics and Theatre Studies at the University of Toronto.Peter Wilson is William Ritchie Professor of Classics at the University of Sydney.

• Introduction ; PERFORMANCE: EXPLORATIONS ; 1. Generic Boundaries in Late Fifth-Century Athens ; 2. Audience and Emotion in the Reception of Greek Drama ; 3. Greek Middle-Brow Drama (Something to do with Aphrodite?) ; 4. Costing the Dionysia ; 5. Nothing to do with Demeter? Something to do with Sicily! Theatre and Society in the Early Fifth-Century West ; PERFORMANCE: EPIC ; 6. The Odyssey as Performance Poetry ; 7. Performance and Rivalry: Homer, Odysseus, and Hesiod ; 8. Performing the Will of Zeus: The Dios boule and the Scope of Early Greek Epic ; PERFORMANCE: TRAGEDY ; 9. Theatrical Furies: Thoughts on Eumenides ; 10. Aeschylus' Eumenides, Chronotopes, and the 'Aetiological Mode' ; 11. Star Choruses: Eleusis, Orphism, and New Musical Imagery and Dance ; 12. The Last Word: Ritual, Power, and Performance in Euripides' Hiketides ; 13. Intimate Relations: Children, Childbearing, and Parentage on the Euripidean Stage ; 14. Character and Characterization in Greek Tragedy ; PERFORMANCE: COMEDY ; 15. Scenes at the Door in Aristophanic Comedy ; 16. The Poetics of the Mask in Old Comedy ; PERFORMANCE: ICONOGRAPHY ; 17. Putting Performance into Focus ; 18. The Greek Gem: A Token of Recognition ; 19. Image and Representation in the Pottery of Magna Graecia ; PERFORMANCE: RECEPTION ; 20. Wagner's Greeks: The Politics of Hellenism ; 21. Resurrecting Ancient Greece in Nazi German: The Oresteia as Part of the Olympic Games in 1936 ; 22. Can the Odyssey ever be Tragic? Historical Perspectives on the Theatrical Realization of Greek Epic ; 23. An Oedipus for our Times? Yeats's Version of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos

Literary scholarship has sometimes been accused of turning a blind eye to the realities of politics and power, but this and other essays in Performance are keenly aware of the fact that drama, even when it becomes "classical" does not inhabit a world of its own, but remains open to fresh interpretations, even wilful exploration.