The Senecan Aesthetic

A Performance History

By: Helen Slaney

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Hardcover | 31 December 2015

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Hardcover
336 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.97 x 2.24

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Alongside the works of the better-known classical Greek dramatists, the tragedies of Lucius Annaeus Seneca have exerted a profound influence over the dramaturgical development of European theatre. The Senecan Aesthetic surveys the multifarious ways in which Senecan tragedy has been staged, from the Renaissance up to the present day: plundered for neo-Latin declamation and seeping into the blood-soaked revenge tragedies of Shakespeare's contemporaries, seasoned with French neoclassical rigor, and inflated by Restoration flamboyance. In the mid-eighteenth century, the pincer movement of naturalism and philhellenism began to squeeze Seneca off the stage until August Wilhelm Schlegel's shrill denunciation silenced what he called its "frigid bombast." The Senecan aesthetic, repressed but still present, staged its return in the twentieth century in the work of Antonin Artaud, who regarded Seneca as "the greatest tragedian of history." This volume restores Seneca to a canonical position
among the playwrights of antiquity, recognizing him as one of the most important, most revered, and most reviled, and in doing so reveals how theory, practice, and scholarship have always been interdependent and inseparable.

Industry Reviews

In addition to offering 'traditional' classicists -- that is to say, for the most part, readers of Seneca -- a new interpretative approach to the tragedies, this volume should also constitute a signifcant contribution to classical performance reception studies. * Emma Buckley, Language and Literature *
Remarkable and very appreciable ... is the effort to renew the study of the senequista theater and its successors and force the reader to value otherwise certain phenomena already well known as rhetoric pathetic, the metatheality and also the dynamic structure that drives to the Senecan characters of the furor al scelus nefas (the monstrous crime). ... Undoubtedly, his greatest achievement consists in proposing, from Seneca, a diachronic reflection on the essence of the theater that goes beyond the aesthetic framework to interrogate also their anthropological foundations. * Florence d'Artois, Bulletin of the Comediantes *
a welcome addition to the growing body of work on the reception of Senecan tragedy and the plays' performance history ... Slaney provides an excellent history of the reception of Senecan drama since the early modern period. She is particularly sensitive to how complex this history is, especially during periods when Seneca was officially out of favour. * Christopher Star, Classical Journal Online *

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