Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' "Bacchae" [Paperback]

In his playBacchae, Euripides chooses as his central figure the god who crosses the boundaries among god, man, and beast, between reality and imagination, and between art and madness. In so doing, he explores what in tragedy is able to reach beyond the social, ritual, and historical context from which tragedy itself rises. Charles Segal's reading of Euripides'Bacchaebuilds gradually from concrete details of cult, setting, and imagery to the work's implications for the nature of myth, language, and theater. This volume presents the argument that the Dionysiac poetics of the play characterize a world view and an art form that can admit logical contradictions and hold them in suspension.

Charles Segalis Walter C. Klein Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. His many books includePoetry and Myth in Ancient PastoralandLucretius on Death and Anxiety, both published by Princeton University Press. Here the fruits of intensive and sustained scholarship are combined with a sophisticated awareness of current critical theory to offer a powerful reading of one of the greatest plays of the tradition. . . . Segal offers an exemplary instance of the fusion of traditional scholarship and current critical practice. ---Cyrus Hamlin,Recherches S?miotiques/Semiotic Inquiry Well-written and well-documented, based on extensive reading and intensive study, [the book] reveals theBacchaeas a much more beautiful, more interesting, and more important play than has thus far been realized. ---W. J. Verdenius,Mnemosyne