The Transformations of Tragedy explores different Christian influences, from the Early Modern to Modern periods, upon the development of post-classical Western tragedy.

Ovid is today best known for his grand epic, Metamorphoses, and elegiac works like the Ars Amatoria and Heroides. Yet he also wrote a Medea, now unfortunately lost. This play kindled in him a lifelong interest in the genre of tragedy, which informed his later poetry and enabled him to continue his career as a tragedian – if only on the page instead of the stage. This book surveys tragic characters, motifs and modalities in the Heroides and the Metamorphoses. In writing love letters, Ovid's heroines and heroes display their suffering in an epistolary theater. In telling transformation stories, Ovid offers an exploded view of the traditional theater, although his characters never stray too far from their dramatic origins. Both works constitute an intratextual network of tragic stories that anticipate the theatrical excesses of Seneca and reflect the all-encompassing spirit of Roman imperium.

Using spiritual and psychological resources, Tragedy Transformed offers wisdom and self-help ideas for people in tragedy. Each chapter contains an interview with people today, a detailed discussion of Job's similar experiences, and self-help suggestions. The book also contains an Epilogue, Endnotes, and an Index.

Is "space" a thing, a container, an abstraction, a metaphor, or a social construct? This much is certain: space is part and parcel of the theater, of what it is and how it works. In The Play of Space, noted classicist-director Rush Rehm offers a strikingly original approach to the spatial parameters of Greek tragedy as performed in the open-air theater of Dionysus. Emphasizing the interplay between natural place and fictional setting, between the world visible to the audience and that evoked by individual tragedies, Rehm argues for an ecology of the ancient theater, one that "nests" fifth-century theatrical space within other significant social, political, and religious spaces of Athens. Drawing on the work of James J. Gibson, Kurt Lewin, and Michel Foucault, Rehm crosses a range of disciplines--classics, theater studies, cognitive psychology, archaeology and architectural history, cultural studies, and performance theory--to analyze the phenomenology of space and its transformations in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. His discussion of Athenian theatrical and spatial practice challenges the contemporary view that space represents a "text" to be read, or constitutes a site of structural dualities (e.g., outside-inside, public-private, nature-culture). Chapters on specific tragedies explore the spatial dynamics of homecoming ("space for returns"); the opposed constraints of exile ("eremetic space" devoid of normal community); the power of bodies in extremis to transform their theatrical environment ("space and the body"); the portrayal of characters on the margin ("space and the other"); and the tragic interactions of space and temporality ("space, time, and memory"). An appendix surveys pre-Socratic thought on space and motion, related ideas of Plato and Aristotle, and, as pertinent, later views on space developed by Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, and Einstein. Eloquently written and with Greek texts deftly translated, this book yields rich new insights into our oldest surviving drama.

This book provides a novel way of looking at translational phenomena in contemporary performances of Attic tragedies via the formidable work of three directors, each of whom bears the aesthetic imprint of Samuel Beckett: Theodoros Terzopoulos, Şahika Tekand and Tadashi Suzuki. Through a discerningly transdisciplinary approach, translation becomes re(trans)formed into a mode of physical action, its mimetic nature reworked according to the individual directors’ responses to Attic tragedies. As such, the highly complex notion of mimesis comes into prominence as a thematic thread, divulging the specific ways in which the pathos epitomised in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides is reawakened on the contemporary stage. By employing mimesis as a conceptual motor under the overarching rubric of the art of tragic theatre, the monograph appeals to a wide range of scholarly readers and practitioners across the terrains of Translation Studies, Theatre Studies, Classical Reception, Comparative Literature and Beckett Studies.

This comprehensive study establishes the importance of an unexpected genre, tragedy, in the career of the most mercurial Western poet.

Where did her Father get his choice of a name? Everyone just assumed it was because he loved operas and named her after the Spanish gypsy in "Carmen." As she matured into a stunningly beautiful young girl with an olive complexion, dark hair and dark eyes, she resembled more of the Hispanic race than her Caucasian ancestry. Her lack of identity in early childhood combined with the rejection and abuse from her family of origin, led Carmyn to believe that the "y" in her name was the beginning of her feeling like a misplaced "why" in life. After a failed suicide attempt at age thirteen, Carmyn sought to find the answers to the untold many "whys" in her life. A dramatic conclusion weaves the past with the present and shines with the compelling truth and hope that only God can bring light out of darkness. Her redemption is found veiled in the symbolism of roses, the love of an unforgettable caretaker named Rosetta, and a divine revelation from God that ultimately transforms her tragedies into triumphs.