Roman Comedy

Roman Comedy PDF Author: David Konstan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731750
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
This book explores the social institutions, the prevailing social values, and the ideology of the ancient city-state as revealed in Roman Comedy. "The very essence of comedy is social," writes David Konstan, "and in the complex movement of its plots we may be able to discern the lineaments and contradictions of the reigning ideas of an age." David Konstan looks closely at eight plays: Plautus's Aulularia, Asinaria, Captivi, Rudens, Cistellaria, and Truculentus, and Terence's Phormio and Hecyra. Offering new interpretations of each, he develops a "typology of plot forms" by analyzing structural features and patterns of conventional behavior in the plays, and he relates the results of his literary analysis to contemporary social conditions. He argues that the plays address tensions that were potentially disruptive to the ancient city-state, and that they tended to resolve these tensions in ways that affirmed traditional values. Roman Comedy is an innovative and challenging book that will be welcomed by students of classical literature, ancient social history, the history of the theater, and comedy as a genre.

Roman Comedy

Roman Comedy PDF Author: David Konstan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731750
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores the social institutions, the prevailing social values, and the ideology of the ancient city-state as revealed in Roman Comedy. "The very essence of comedy is social," writes David Konstan, "and in the complex movement of its plots we may be able to discern the lineaments and contradictions of the reigning ideas of an age." David Konstan looks closely at eight plays: Plautus's Aulularia, Asinaria, Captivi, Rudens, Cistellaria, and Truculentus, and Terence's Phormio and Hecyra. Offering new interpretations of each, he develops a "typology of plot forms" by analyzing structural features and patterns of conventional behavior in the plays, and he relates the results of his literary analysis to contemporary social conditions. He argues that the plays address tensions that were potentially disruptive to the ancient city-state, and that they tended to resolve these tensions in ways that affirmed traditional values. Roman Comedy is an innovative and challenging book that will be welcomed by students of classical literature, ancient social history, the history of the theater, and comedy as a genre.

Nature of Roman Comedy

Nature of Roman Comedy PDF Author: George E. Duckworth
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400872375
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
This book provides the most complete and definitive study of Roman comedy. Originally published in 1952. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy

The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy PDF Author: Martin T. Dinter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107002109
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Provides a comprehensive critical engagement with Roman comedy and its reception presented by leading international scholars in accessible and up-to-date chapters.

The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy

The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy PDF Author: Michael Fontaine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199743541
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 913

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy marks the first comprehensive introduction to and reference work for the unified study of ancient comedy. From its birth in Greece to its end in Rome, from its Hellenistic to its Imperial receptions, no topic is neglected. The 41 essays offer cutting-edge guides through comedy's immense terrain.

Roman Comedy

Roman Comedy PDF Author: Gesine Manuwald
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004435123
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description
This contribution by Gesine Manuwald provides an introduction to all varieties of ‘Roman comedy’, including primarily fabula palliata (‘New Comedy’, as represented by Plautus and Terence) as well as fabula togata, fabula Atellana, mimus and pantomimus.

Music in Roman Comedy

Music in Roman Comedy PDF Author: Timothy J. Moore
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107006481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
This book offers a new explanation of how the plays of Plautus and Terence worked as musical theatre.

Catullus and Roman Comedy

Catullus and Roman Comedy PDF Author: Christopher B. Polt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108839819
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Argues that Catullus adapts Roman comedy to explore private ideas about love, friendship, and social rivalry.

Slave Theater in the Roman Republic

Slave Theater in the Roman Republic PDF Author: Amy Richlin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108216439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
Roman comedy evolved early in the war-torn 200s BCE. Troupes of lower-class and slave actors traveled through a militarized landscape full of displaced persons and the newly enslaved; together, the actors made comedy to address mixed-class, hybrid, multilingual audiences. Surveying the whole of the Plautine corpus, where slaves are central figures, and the extant fragments of early comedy, this book is grounded in the history of slavery and integrates theories of resistant speech, humor, and performance. Part I shows how actors joked about what people feared - natal alienation, beatings, sexual abuse, hard labor, hunger, poverty - and how street-theater forms confronted debt, violence, and war loss. Part II catalogues the onstage expression of what people desired: revenge, honor, free will, legal personhood, family, marriage, sex, food, free speech; a way home, through memory; and manumission, or escape - all complicated by the actors' maleness. Comedy starts with anger.

Barbarian Play: Plautus' Roman Comedy

Barbarian Play: Plautus' Roman Comedy PDF Author: William S. Anderson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442654295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In this volume William S. Anderson sets Plautus, who wrote Rome's earliest surviving poetry, in his rightful place among the Greek and Roman writers of what we know as New Comedy (fourth to second centuries). Anderson begins by defining major innovations that Plautus made on inherited Greek New Comedy (Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus), transforming it from romantic domestic drama to a celebration of rollicking family anarchy. He shows how Plautus diminished the traditional importance of love and replaced it with a new major theme: 'heroic badness,' especially embodied in the rogue slave (ancestor of the impudent servant, valet, or maid). Anderson then examines the unique verbal texture of Plautus' drama and demonstrates his revolt against realism, his drive to have his characters defy everyday circumstances and pit their intrepid linguistic wit against social order, their Roman extravagant impudence against Greek self-control. Finally, Anderson explores the special form of metatheatre that we admire in Plautus, by which he undermines the assumptions of his Greek 'models' and replaces them with a new, confident Roman comedy.

Reading Roman Comedy

Reading Roman Comedy PDF Author: Alison Sharrock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139482645
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
For many years the domain of specialists in early Latin, in complex metres, and in the reconstruction of texts, Roman comedy is now established in the mainstream of Classical literary criticism. Where most books stress the original performance as the primary location for the encountering of the plays, this book finds the locus of meaning and appreciation in the activity of a reader, albeit one whose manner of reading necessarily involves the imaginative reconstruction of performance. The texts are treated, and celebrated, as literary devices, with programmatic beginnings, middles, ends, and intertexts. All the extant plays of Plautus and Terence have at least a bit part in this book, which seeks to expose the authors' fabulous artificiality and artifice, while playing along with their differing but interrelated poses of generic humility.