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In this provocative book, Pietro Pucci explores what he sees as Euripides's revolutionary literary art. While scholars have long pointed to subversive elements in Euripides’s plays, Pucci goes a step further in identifying a Euripidean program of enlightened thought enacted through carefully wrought textual strategies. The driving force behind this program is Euripides’s desire to subvert the traditional anthropomorphic view of the Greek gods—a belief system that in his view strips human beings of their independence and ability to act wisely and justly. Instead of fatuous religious beliefs, Athenians need the wisdom and the strength to navigate the challenges and difficulties of life.Throughout his lifetime, Euripides found himself the target of intense criticism and ridicule. He was accused of promoting new ideas that were considered destructive. Like his contemporary, Socrates, he was considered a corrupting influence. No wonder, then, that Euripides had to carry out his revolution "under cover." Pucci lays out the various ways the playwright skillfully inserted his philosophical principles into the text through innovative strategies of plot development, language and composition, and production techniques that subverted the traditionally staged anthropomorphic gods.
Pietro Pucci is Goldwin Smith Professor of Classics Emeritus at Cornell University. He is the author of several books, including Odysseus Polutropos: Intertexual Readings in the "Odyssey" and the "Iliad", The Violence of Pity in Euripides’ "Medea", and Oedipus and the Fabrication of the Father: "Oedipus Tyrannus" in Modern Criticism and Philosophy.
"Reading these texts through Pietro Pucci's exacting and precise critical lens is an exhilarating experience that transforms our understanding of the nature of Euripides’s tragic theater."
Andrew Ford, Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature, Princeton University:
"Like the revolutionary and resolutely demystifying Euripides he puts before the reader, Pietro Pucci has been a pioneer in bringing intertextual and deconstructive readings to the major Greek poets. And the Euripides depicted here, like his learned and humane critic, brings to bear an acute sensitivity to the artifice of language to produce a poetry that not only dispels illusions but also fortifies the reader."
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