Aristophanes in Britain: Old Comedy in the Nineteenth Century
Peter Swallow, "Aristophanes in Britain: Old Comedy in the Nineteenth Century "
English | ISBN: 019286856X | 2023 | 304 pages | EPUB, PDF | 3 MB + 55 MB
English | ISBN: 019286856X | 2023 | 304 pages | EPUB, PDF | 3 MB + 55 MB
In this lively and wide-ranging study, Peter Swallow explores the reception of Aristophanes in Britain throughout the long-nineteenth century, setting it in the broader context of Victorian Classicism and, more specifically, the period's reception of Greek tragedy. Swallow shows the surprising extent to which Aristophanes was repurposed across an array of mediums in Victorian Britain, and demonstrates that Aristophanic reception in the period was always a process of speaking to contemporary issues–making Old Comedy new.
The book examines two strands of Aristophanic reception: the political and the aesthetic. From the start of the long-nineteenth century, the British reception of Aristophanes tied into contemporary political debate, as historians, translators and commentators, and even the burlesque writer J.R. Planché activated Aristophanes in support of their own political positions. But each writer's conceptualisation of Aristophanes was as different as their political outlooks. While many writers who appropriated Aristophanes for their cause were Tories, a notable outlier is Percy Shelley, whose Aristophanic drama
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