Overview

Prometheus Bound is a play beloved of revolutionaries, romantics and rebels, with a fierce optimism tempered by an acute awareness of the compromises, dangers and obsessions of political action. This companion sets the play in its historical context, explores its challenge to authority, and traces its reception from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Many scholars have disputed its Aeschylean authorship, but it has proved the most influential of tragedies outside academia. Marx's favourite tragedy, Prometheus Bound is also a foundational text for the genre of science fiction through its influence on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In its open-eyed celebration of technology and democracy, it is the tragedy for the modern age.

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9780715634769

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Reviews

Ruffell has provided a worthy contribution to this very useful series of companions to ancient tragedy. He covers all the bases with well-documented scholarship and eminent fairness to all sides of what has become in the last few decades a very perplexing and controversial drama... he argues his case well and does an admirable job of embedding the play within its political and intellectual context. -- Ian C. Storey, Trent University, Canada Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Author Information

Ian Ruffell is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow. His main research interest is Greek drama and he has worked most extensively on comedy. His monograph, Politics and Anti-Realism in Athenian Old Comedy: The Art of the Impossible, was published in 2011.

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