Search citation statements
Paper Sections
Citation Types
Year Published
Publication Types
Relationship
Authors
Journals
This essay pursues the history of the widespread and influential claim that the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides anticipates the social concerns of modernity and the formal strategies of modernism. The claim originated at the same time as the development of the canon of German tragic criticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Building on but importantly altering the ancient criticism of Euripides from Aristophanes and Aristotle, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schiller each understood Euripides in close and uncomfortable proximity to their own political moment. The criticism that developed out of this canon both identified Euripides as an untimely modern and produced a series of hostile appraisals of his work. In the conjuncture of modernism in the early twentieth century, professional classicists and modernist poets both accepted the claim of Euripides’ untimely modernity and transvalued its terms: the projection of a ruptural, anticipatory modernity onto Euripides allowed the tragedian to assume the cast of a fellow-traveler of the literary projects of modernism itself. Following the modernist conjuncture, the untimely modernity claim has thoroughly influenced, and frequently dominated, the translation, adaptation, and interpretation of Euripides both inside and outside the professional study of Classics.
This essay pursues the history of the widespread and influential claim that the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides anticipates the social concerns of modernity and the formal strategies of modernism. The claim originated at the same time as the development of the canon of German tragic criticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Building on but importantly altering the ancient criticism of Euripides from Aristophanes and Aristotle, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schiller each understood Euripides in close and uncomfortable proximity to their own political moment. The criticism that developed out of this canon both identified Euripides as an untimely modern and produced a series of hostile appraisals of his work. In the conjuncture of modernism in the early twentieth century, professional classicists and modernist poets both accepted the claim of Euripides’ untimely modernity and transvalued its terms: the projection of a ruptural, anticipatory modernity onto Euripides allowed the tragedian to assume the cast of a fellow-traveler of the literary projects of modernism itself. Following the modernist conjuncture, the untimely modernity claim has thoroughly influenced, and frequently dominated, the translation, adaptation, and interpretation of Euripides both inside and outside the professional study of Classics.
T. S. Eliot has been a major, if challenging, figure for students of reception and the Classical Tradition, and is implicated in an important debate on historicist versus aestheticist models of reception study. This article challenges assumptions about his position on, and practice of, reception. The politics implicit in theorists’ references to Eliot is teased out, and the position he took in response to inter-war New Humanism is shown to be predominantly historicist. An analysis of The Family Reunion (1939) then suggests that the Modernist-poetic approach he therefore took to the Oresteia broke so decisively with existing models of reception as to have called the fact of reception into question. The play is also shown to build on H.D.’s experiments in translation and to respond to Aeschylean receptions by Robinson Jeffers and Eugene O’Neill. It is further suggested that it anticipates several aspects of recent Reception Theory.
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.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.