Figuring the Female explores language as a cultural document for an intervention into the ways that female alterity is framed in the ancient world. Grillparzer creates a new way of being that is primarily discursive in which the once unintelligible female figure may be known and heard.

Figuring the Female explores language as a cultural document for an intervention into the ways that female alterity is framed in the ancient world. Grillparzer creates a new way of being that is primarily discursive in which the once unintelligible female figure may be known and heard.

This book offers to academic and general public readers timely reflections about our relationships to violence. Taking cues from the self-reflexivity, themes, and subject matters of Holocaust, queer, and Black studies, this large group of diverse intellectuals wrestles with questions that connect past, present and future: where do I stand in relation to violence? What is my attitude toward that adjacency? Whose story gets to be told by whom? What story do I take this image to be telling? How do I co-witness to another’s suffering? How do I honor the agency and resilience of family members or historical personages? How do past violence and injustice connect to the present? In smart, self-conscious, passionate, and often painfully beautiful prose, cultural practitioners, historians and cultural studies scholars such as Angelika Bammer, Doris Bergen, Ann Cvetkovich, Marianne Hirsch, Priscilla Layne, Mark Roseman, Leo Spitzer, Susan R. Suleiman and Viktor Witkowski explore such questions, inviting readers to do the same. By making available compelling examples of thinkers performing their own work within the cauldron of crises that came to a boil in 2020 and continued into the next year, this volume proposes strategies for moving forward with hope.

This work provides a general survey with the main emphasis on the thematic and dramatic content of the plays (genesis and background, structure, characters, major themes), as well as questions of language, style and imagery, especially where these contribute to the play's theatrical effectiveness. This work's most important contribution to scholarship is the investigation of Grillparzer's interest in the Classical generation of writers, reflected in almost all his works, either in the form of a debt to a particular work or in the echoing of key philosophical themes of the period. Grillparzer's mature works reveal an interest in high ideals on the one hand and a recognition of the demands of everyday reality on the other, while the formal precision of Classical drama is enriched by a theatrical immediacy in keeping with Viennese traditions. This combination reflects the conflicts in Grillparzer's own personality and results in a considerable degree of ambiguity in the presentation of characters and themes, but it is precisely such a rejection of easy solutions in his works that ensures their relevance for a modern audience.

The essays in this collection range widely not only over Karolina Pavlova's oeuvre but also in their analytical stances. The volume includes close poetic and prosodic analysis, literary history, gender studies, intertextual comparison and biography.

Examining the appropriation of transgressive, violent female figures from ancient Greek literature and myth by late Victorian writers, Olverson reveals the extent to which ancient antagonists like the murderous Medea and the sinister Circe were employed as a means to protest against and comment upon contemporary social and political institutions.

Part one of this study presents a general discussion of a new theory of the tragic, an outline of the history of tragedy, and the methodology. Part two contains interpretations of Grillparzer's ten completed dramas with regard to their tragic nature and to fate and guilt concepts in particular. The third is a summary, a general discussion of Grillparzer as tragedian, and a proposal for solving the dilemma experienced by many interpreters in this context.