Tragic Rites: Narrative and Ritual in Sophoclean Drama

Presenting an innovative new reading of Sophocles’ plays, Tragic Rites analyzes the poetic and narrative function of ritual in the seven extant plays of Sophocles. Adriana Brook closely examines four of them—Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus—in the context of her wide-ranging consideration of the entire Sophoclean corpus. Exploring the playwright’s dramatic technique, she shows how he used elements of ritual to guide the perceptions and expectations of his fifth-century audience about plot and character. Employing both modern ritual theory and Aristotle’s Poetics, Brook exposes the deep structural analogies between ritual and narrative, the parallels between mistakes in ritual and deviations from the expected in the plot, and the relationship between ritual content and dramatic closure.Tragic Rites: Narrative and Ritual in Sophoclean Drama is written by Adriana E. Brook and published by University of Wisconsin Press. ISBNs for Tragic Rites are 9780299313838, 0299313832 and the print ISBNs are 9780299313807, 0299313808.