Language and Desire in Seneca's Phaedra.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Slightly rubbed jacket, small price tags on front flap, crease in back flap, pencil annotation on endpaper, minimal staining on edge, otherwise very good and clean. / Leicht beriebener Umschlag, kleine Preisschilder auf vorderem Klappentext, Knick im hinteren Klappentext, Bleistiftanmerkung auf Vorsatzblatt, minimale Anschmutzung auf Schnitt, sonst sehr gut und sauber. - This close reading of Seneca�s most influential tragedy explores the question of how poetic language produces the impression of an individual self, a full personality with a conscious and unconscious emotional life. Discussing Seneca�s language as a vehicle for revealing the repressed or imperfectly understood desires of his characters, Charles Segal demonstrates that the poet�s deliberate distortions of rhetoric function in a manner akin to the transformative processes of the unconscious. Seneca sets each character into a psychological landscape in which ancient mythical symbols are reinterpreted in a new, internalizing way. At the same time, his elaborate stvle reflects awareness of his own textual production. This book will interest students of classical and comparative literature and myth and those concerned with the psychological approach to literary criticism. Mindful of the whole corpus of Senecan tragedies, Professor Segal suggests for contemporary readers the psychological depth Shakespeare, Webster, and Racine found in that body of work. He also discusses the application of theories of Jacques Lacan to literary texts. - Charles Segal is David Benedict Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His works include Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Harvard, 1981) and Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral: Essays on Theocritus and Virgil and Dionysiae Poetics and Euripides� Bacchae (Princeton, 1981 and 1982).