Strongly influenced by Classical drama, Jean Racine (1639-99) broke away from the grandiose theatricality of baroque drama to create works of intense psychological realism, with characters manipulated by cruel and vengeful gods. Iphigenia depicts a princess's absolute submission to her father's will, despite his determination to sacrifice her to gain divine favour before going to war. Described by Voltaire as 'the masterpiece of the human mind', Phaedra shows a woman's struggle to overcome her overwhelming passion for her stepson - an obsession that brings destruction to a noble family. And Athaliah portrays a ruthless pagan queen, who defies Jehovah in her desperate attempt to keep the throne of Jerusalem from its legitimate heir.

Collected here for the first time in the series are three major plays by Euripides: Bacchae, translated by Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal, a powerful examination of the horror and beauty of Dionysiac ecstasy; Herakles, translated by Tom Sleigh and Christian Wolff, a violent dramatization of the madness and exile of one of the most celebrated mythical figures; and The Phoenician Women, translated by Peter Burian and Brian Swamm, a disturbing interpretation of the fate of the House of Laios following the tragic fall of Oedipus. These three tragedies were originally available as single volumes. This volume retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions and adds a single combined glossary and Greek line numbers.

Agememnon is the first part of the Aeschylus's Orestian trilogy in which the leader of the Greek army returns from the Trojan war to be murdered by his treacherous wife Clytemnestra. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex the king sets out to uncover the cause of the plague that has struck his city, only to disover the devastating truth about his relationship with his mother and his father. Medea is the terrible story of a woman's bloody revenge on her adulterous husband through the murder of her own children.

A Complete Annotated Listing More than 1,500 titles in print Authoritative introductions and notes by leading academics and contemporary authors Up-to-date translations from award-winning translators Readers guides and other resources available online Penguin Classics on air online radio programs

A critical re-examination of the views of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Nietzsche on tragedy. Ancient Greek tragedy is revealed as surprisingly modern and experimental, while such concepts as mimesis, catharsis, hubris and the tragic collision are discussed from different perspectives.

Writing and violence have been inextricably linked in Spanish America from the Conquest onward. Spanish authorities used written edicts, laws, permits, regulations, logbooks, and account books to control indigenous peoples whose cultures were predominantly oral, giving rise to a mingled awe and mistrust of the power of the written word that persists in Spanish American culture to the present day. In this masterful study, Aníbal González traces and describes how Spanish American writers have reflected ethically in their works about writing's relation to violence and about their own relation to writing. Using an approach that owes much to the recent "turn to ethics" in deconstruction and to the works of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, he examines selected short stories and novels by major Spanish American authors from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries: Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel Zeno Gandía, Teresa de la Parra, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar. He shows how these authors frequently display an attitude he calls "graphophobia," an intense awareness of the potential dangers of the written word.

This book examines the writings of four ancient Greeks-Homer, Thucydides, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Each of these four individuals represents a different approach toward the human condition, ranging from the heroic and tragic to the comic and absurd. This book focuses on how the human condition can best be understood within the framework of these four perspectives by examining the major contributions of these Greek writers, whether in the form of epic (Homer's Iliad), history (Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War), or drama (the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes). These various perceptions of Greek thought illuminate our understanding of what it means to be fully human. By focusing on the concepts of the heroic, tragic, comic, and absurd, we can see how these ancient Greek authors still provide key insights for us today as they clarify those timeless features that define the human condition.