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2017: 3 Novelists search the Attic and find more than Tragedy there.

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Edited by Steve Bamlett, Sunday, 25 Jun 2017, 19:03

2017: 3 Novelists search the Attic and find more than Tragedy there.

This blog is my preface to a project I have set myself to discover what, if anything, links three novelists (all already known to me) in a desire to take their narratives from Attic tragedy. In the fifth to fourth century BCE a vast social, religious and political cultural project created a vast series of dramas of which only 40 or so remain extant.

Since that time, these dramas –based in a mythological ‘history’ shared by not only writers but by people, literate and illiterate (the latter the large majority) – have remained the staple of world literatures, continually reinvented by cultures who returned to them to express moral, religious, political, psychological truths (or admixtures thereof) that were often widely divergent in their interpretation and functional application.

Hence, any writer who revisits the stories therein often revisits a palimpsest of divergent narratives and narrative functions that variously might also recall the aesthetics of Aristotle, the political divergence that French society found in comparing Racine and Corneille, and the inconsistences within and between psychologists including William James, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre.

So this blog is the preface to 4 others which will look at:

1.      Natalie Haynes The Children of Jocasta on the Labdacid family tragedies and their versions.

2.      David Vann Bright Air Black in which Attic Greece confronted its ambivalent dependence on the Ancient East.

3.      Colm Toibin The House of Names in which myths of Mycenae find new application.

4.      Summary and comparative conclusions

I’m aware that this isn’t a visited blog and I'm 'cool' (indeed almost frozen) about that cool

This is a project basically by me for me, but if anyone happens upon it, or part of it, please join in and initiate discussion if you’d like to. You can be as personal as me.

All the best

Steve

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