Examines the way in which Sophocles' play "Oedipus Tyrannus" and its hero, Oedipus, King of Thebes, were probably received in their own time and place, and relates this to twentieth-century receptions and interpretations, including those of Sigmund Freud.

A truly international, authoritative A–Z guide to five centuries of propaganda, in both wartime and peacetime, which covers key moments, techniques, concepts, and some of the most influential propagandists in history. This fascinating survey provides a comprehensive introduction to propaganda, its changing nature, its practitioners, and its impact on the past five centuries of world history. Written by leading experts, it covers the masters of the art from Joseph Goebbels to Mohandas Gandhi and examines enormously influential works of persuasion such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, techniques such as films and posters, and key concepts like black propaganda and brainwashing. Case studies reveal the role of mass persuasion during the Reformation, and wars throughout history. Regional studies cover propaganda superpowers, such as Russia, China, and the United States, as well as little-known propaganda campaigns in Southeast Asia, Ireland, and Scandinavia. The book traces the evolution of propaganda from the era of printed handbills to computer fakery, and profiles such brilliant practitioners of the art as Third Reich film director Leni Riefenstahl and 19th-century cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose works helped to bring the notorious Boss Tweed to justice.

Orestes was produced in 1750, an experiment which intensely interested the literary world and the public. In his Dedicatory Letters to the Duchess of Maine, Voltaire has the following passage on the Greek drama: "We should not, I acknowledge, endeavor to imitate what is weak and defective in the ancients: it is most probable that their faults were well known to their contemporaries. I am satisfied, Madam, that the wits of Athens condemned, as well as you, some of those repetitions, and some declamations with which Sophocles has loaded his Electra: they must have observed that he had not dived deep enough into the human heart. I will moreover fairly confess, that there are beauties peculiar not only to the Greek language, but to the climate, to manners and times, which it would be ridiculous to transplant hither. Therefore I have not copied exactly the Electra of Sophocles-much more I knew would be necessary; but I have taken, as well as I could, all the spirit and substance of it."

This volume brings together Seth Benardete's studies of Hesiod's Theogony, Homer's Iliad, and Greek tragedy, of eleven Platonic dialogues, and Aristotle's Metaphysics. These essays, some never before published, others difficult to find, span four decades of his work and document its impressive range. Benardete's philosophic reading of the poets and his poetic reading of the philosophers share a common ground that makes this collection a whole. The key, suggested by his reflections on Leo Strauss in the last piece, lies in the question of how to read Plato. Benardete's way is characterized not just by careful attention to the literary form that separates doctrine from dialogue, and speeches from deed; rather, by following the dynamic of these differences, he uncovers the argument that belongs to the dialogue as a whole. The "turnaround" such an argument undergoes bears consequences for understanding the dialogue as radical as the conversion of the philosopher in Plato's image of the cave. Benardete's original interpretations are the fruits of this discovery of the "argument of the action."

This work traces the extraordinary journeys of three World War II radio broadcasters in Germany and Japan whose wartime choices became treason in Britain, Australia, and the United States. John Amery, a member of a well-connected British family, joined Hitler's propagandists in Berlin. He was executed for treason by Britain after the war. Charles Cousens was a soldier in Japanese captivity when he was put to work on Radio Tokyo with a team of Allied POWs. Cousens was later tried as a traitor in Australia. Iva Toguri, better known as Tokyo Rose, was an American student visiting Japan when war broke out. She broadcast her English show on Radio Tokyo out of necessity rather than conviction. The United States jailed Toguri for treason. Through these powerful stories, this work not only sheds new light on the history of wartime radio broadcasting in Germany and Japan, but also examines the laws of treason in Britain, Australia, and the United States and the ways in which trials such as these helped shape modern-day treason trials. All three accounts provoke thoughtful questions as to the nature of justice—and the justice of retribution. This work traces the extraordinary journeys of three World War II radio broadcasters in Germany and Japan whose wartime choices became treason in Britain, Australia, and the United States.

Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lusíadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigné's Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated. Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.