The purpose of this book is to examine the variety, the mechanisms, and the poetological intention of the effect of surprise in Aristophanic comedy, addressing the phenomenon not as a self-evident or unselfconscious element of comedy as a genre, but as an elaborate system which characterises the style of the specific dramatist. More precisely, the book analyses Aristophanes’ most prominent verbal, thematic, and theatrical modes of surprise from a typological perspective, and interprets them as comprising the key area in which the playwright claims and demonstrates his artistic superiority over rival genres and individual poets. In line with this purpose, two parallel aims of the book are to provide an original commentary on the passages under examination, and to promote the study of modern performances – a practice which has so far been either restricted to Classical Reception or only theoretically acknowledged (if at all) by mainstream philological scholarship. This is a timely book on a topic of wide current interest across a range of interlocking disciplines: emotion studies, semiotics, narratology, information theory, and -most pertinently for this book- humour research.

European Classical Literature (MJC-2) 1. Homer : The Illiad 2. Sophocles “Oedipus the King” (The Three Theban Plays) 3. Plato : The Republic Book-X 4. Aristotle : Poetics European Classical Literature (MIC-2) 1. The Book of Job 2. The Holy Bible, The New International Version (Zondervan 2011) 3. Plautus : Pot of Gold

A creative writing class in a book -REVISED. Major revisions take this popular Complete Idiot's Guide to a new level, offering readers a better way to unlock their creativity from the first page. Exercises help them explore their talents and experiment with different genres and forms of writing, including short stories, narrative fiction, memoirs, magazine articles, poetry, drama, blogging, and freewriting.

Despite the many studies of Greek comedy and tragedy separately, scholarship has generally neglected the relation of the two. And yet the genres developed together, were performed together, and influenced each other to the extent of becoming polar opposites. In Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse, Stephanie Nelson considers this opposition through an analysis of how the genres developed, by looking at the tragic and comic elements in satyr drama, and by contrasting specific Aristophanes plays with tragedies on similar themes, such as the individual, the polis, and the gods. The study reveals that tragedy’s focus on necessity and a quest for meaning complements a neglected but critical element in Athenian comedy: its interest in freedom, and the ambivalence of its incompatible visions of reality.