N.J. Sewell-Rutter, Guilt by Descent. Moral Inheritance and Decision Making in Greek Tragedy

N.J. Sewell-Rutter, Guilt by Descent. Moral Inheritance and Decision Making in Greek Tragedy. Oxford/New York:  Oxford University Press, coll. " Oxford Classical Monographs", 2007, xiii-202p. 

Isbn (ean13): 978-0-19-922733-4

Recension de cet ouvrage par  Enrico Medda (Dipartimento di Filologia Classica, Università di Pisa) dans Bryn Mawr Classical Review: 2008.10.24

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-10-24.html

Présentation de l'éditeur:

 Blighted and accursed families are an inescapable feature of Greektragedy, and many scholars have treated questions of inherited guilt,curses, and divine causation. N.J. Sewell-Rutter gives these familiarissues a fresh appraisal, arguing that tragedy is a medium that fusesthe conceptual with the provoking and exciting of emotion, neither ofwhich can be ignored if the texts are to be fully understood. He paysparticular attention to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes and the Phoenician Womenof Euripides, both of which dramatize the sorrows of the latergenerations of the House of Oedipus, but in very different, and perhapscomplementary, ways. All Greek quotations are translated, making hisstudy thoroughly accessible to the non-specialist reader.

 N. J. Sewell-Rutter was previously Lecturer in Greek, Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Sommaire:

Introduction 1. Preliminary studies: the supernatural and causation in Herodotus 2. Inherited guilt 3. Curses 4. Erinyes 5. Irruption and insight? The intangible burden of the supernatural in Sophocles' Labdacid plays and `Electra' 6. Fate, freedom, decision making: Eteocles and others Conclusion