Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy

Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. His previous books include Jerusalem: City of Longing, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, and Reading Greek Tragedy.

• Introduction: Entrances and Exits ; Section 1: Tragic Language ; 1: Undoing: Lusis and the Analysis of Irony ; 2: The Audience on Stage: Rhetoric, Emotion and Judgment ; 3: Line for Line ; 4: Choreography: The Lyric Voice of Tragedy ; 5: The Chorus in Action ; Section 2: The Language of Tragedy ; 6: Generalizing about Tragedy ; 7: Generalizing about the Chorus ; 8: The Language of Tragedy and Modernity: How Electra Lost her Piety ; 9: Antigone and the Politics of Sisterhood: The Tragic Language of Sharing ; Coda: Reading With or Without Hegel: From Text to Script ; Glossary ; Bibliography

With this latest book, Simon Goldhill brings his customary acumen and verve to reading the 'language' of Sophoclean tragedy from two very different perspectives. ... By placing between the same covers 'profoundly conservative' and 'rashly revolutionary' critical perspectives (3), Goldhill instills in the reader a new awareness of the interpretive practices that have sustained tragedy scholarship for centuries at the same time that he defamiliarizes them. His eye for telling detail, moreover, combined with his panoramic sweep of intellectual history, is...enthralling.