Overview

This book offers a challenging multi-disciplinary interpretation of Aristophanes' Frogs. Drawing on a wide range of literary and anthropological approaches, it deploys an impressive series of religious and cultural considerations which have never previously been used to illuminate this text. Rather than seeking to recover the 'authorial' meaning of the Frogs, Dr Lada-Richards attempts to reconstruct the wider spectrum of potential meanings that various segments of the play could have had in their own socio-cultural milieu. The key question the book explores is how membership in Greek fifth-century society would have shaped understanding of the play, with particular emphasis on the persona of Dionysus who, as Dr Lada-Richards argues, should not be viewed merely as a stock comic character but as inseparable from the complex, paradoxical figure of his mythical and ritual counterpart. Combining sophistication and complexity with clarity and elegance of style, the book is addresses to the scholar as well as the student of Greek drama and culture, and its insights should appeal to anybody interested in the manifold ways theatre (of any period and culture) remoulds the ritual sequences of the social frame to which it belongs.

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9780198149811

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This book assembles many qualities. It commands attention by its scientific rigor ... based on a courageous multidiciplinary analysis, on an impressingly wide range of literary and cultural approaches and a series of cultural and above all religious considerations that have never before been used to clarify the text of the frogs. * M.Delaunois, Les Etudes Classiques, University of Namur. * an important, comprehensive, theoretically sophisticated, and well-researched treatment of a single play ... a most welcome study. * Mark W. Padilla, Bucknell University. * Lada-Richards provides a powerful and long overdue appreciation of the complexity, sophistication, and importance of Aristophanes Frogs. * Mark W. Padilla, Bucknell University. * Lada-Richards has now brought the Frogs out fully from the shadow of its tragic cousin. * Mark W. Padilla, Bucknell University. * Lada-Richards should receive great praise for this detailed and extremely well-researched monograph ... Initiating Dionysus represents some of the most important scholarship on the Frogs * The Classical Outlook, Vol.78, No.4 *

Lada-Richards should receive great praise for this detailed and extremely well-researched monograph ... Initiating Dionysus represents some of the most important scholarship on the Frogs The Classical Outlook, Vol.78, No.4 Lada-Richards has now brought the Frogs out fully from the shadow of its tragic cousin. Mark W. Padilla, Bucknell University. Lada-Richards provides a powerful and long overdue appreciation of the complexity, sophistication, and importance of Aristophanes Frogs. Mark W. Padilla, Bucknell University. an important, comprehensive, theoretically sophisticated, and well-researched treatment of a single play ... a most welcome study. Mark W. Padilla, Bucknell University. This book assembles many qualities. It commands attention by its scientific rigor ... based on a courageous multidiciplinary analysis, on an impressingly wide range of literary and cultural approaches and a series of cultural and above all religious considerations that have never before been used to clarify the text of the frogs. M.Delaunois, Les Etudes Classiques, University of Namur.

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