The characters of Senecan tragedy are more inward-looking than those of Greek tragedy. One aspect of their inwardness lies in their fierce attempts to define and assert identities for themselves, through their names, actions, family history, mythical precedents, social roles etc. These self-assertions are driven by desire in many forms, chiefly desire for recognition by others, and are closely connected with the tragic outcomes of the dramas. One section of the article is devoted to Oedipus, who insists on identifying with his guilty deeds despite his innocence of intention; another to Phaedra, who has multiple versions of herself and cannot choose between them.
This paper examines an 18 th century Irish language parody of the Aeneid, the Eachtra Ghiolla an Amaráin/Adventures of a Luckless Fellow, by Donncha Rua McNamara, a hedge-schoolmaster in Munster in the south of Ireland. It locates his work within the context of Irish poetic genres, such as the aisling, the Jacobite poetic tradition and his and Ireland's less than ideal economic and political circumstances. It identifies the ways in which McNamara contrasts himself as an ignoble and down-trodden antihero with Aeneas as epic saviour of the Trojans and how he naturalizes and makes palatable to a colonized Irish audience a Latin text written by an imperial power.As to schoolmasters we have too many, and too many mere scholars,
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.