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

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.

The four plays newly translated in this volume are among Euripides' most exciting works. Iphigenia among the Taurians is a story of escape and contrasting Greek and barbarian civilization, set on the Black Sea at the edge of the known world. Bacchae, a profound exploration of the human psyche, deals with the appalling consequences of resistance to Dionysus, god of wine and unfettered emotion. This tragedy, which above all others speaks to our post-Freudian era, is one of Euripides' two last surviving plays. The second, Iphigenia at Aulis, centres on the ultimate dysfunctional family as natural emotion is tested in the tragic crucible of the Greek expedition against Troy. Lastly, Rhesus, probably the work of another playwright, is a thrilling, action-packed Iliad in miniature, dealing with a grisly event in the Trojan War.

**Shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year** The Penguin Classics Book is a reader's companion to the largest library of classic literature in the world. Spanning 4,000 years from the legends of Ancient Mesopotamia to the poetry of the First World War, with Greek tragedies, Icelandic sagas, Japanese epics and much more in between, it encompasses 500 authors and 1,200 books, bringing these to life with lively descriptions, literary connections and beautiful cover designs.

The relationship of myth to literature has largely been overshadowed in contemporary theory by perspectives of a linguistic or sociological orientation and by relativist, sometimes negatory, stances on all searches for meaning. This book attempts to show that myth criticism and critical theories of more recent provenance are not irreconcilable. While taking into consideration some of the more influential tenets of structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist and feminist theory, it applies a post-Jungian ('archetypal') approach to illustrating the perennial nature of a particular myth (the Fall of Man) in two main traditions (Mesopotamian and Christian) and in the contemporary novel in English. The discussions of five major novels by William Golding, Patrick White, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Wilson Harris not only serve to expand the mythological insights achieved in the first part of the book; they also suggest the incommensurability of imaginal, novelistic life with mythology's age-old intuitions about the human condition. Myth criticism emerges from this book as an irreplaceable vantage-point from which man's lapsarian predicament can be scrutinized synchronically as archaic wisdom, contemporary anxiety, and post-colonial commitment to the building of a new human city.