Antigones
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: small sticker residue on dj.
Few myths have haunted the Western imagination with the ferocity of Sophocles' Antigone — and in Antigones, George Steiner undertakes a monumental examination of why this single ancient drama has proven so inexhaustibly generative across more than two millennia of literature, philosophy, music, and art. Steiner chronicles the myth's extraordinary journey from its origins in Greek tragedy through its transformation in the hands of Hegel, Hölderlin, Brecht, Anouilh, and countless others, arguing that the confrontation between Antigone and Creon — between conscience and the state, between the laws of the gods and the laws of men — is the defining conflict of Western moral thought. Written with Steiner's characteristic erudition and fierce intellectual passion, Antigones is far more than a work of comparative literature; it is a sustained meditation on how civilisations inherit, reimagine, and are ultimately shaped by their mythological inheritance. Steiner presents a dazzling synthesis of classical scholarship, philosophy, and cultural criticism, revealing the Antigone myth as a kind of permanent ethical archive, one that each generation is compelled to reopen. For anyone who has ever grappled with duty, dissent, or mortality, this magisterial study leaves a haunting question: what does it mean that we keep returning to this one story?
Author: George Steiner
Format: Hardback
Published: 1984, Clarendon Press · Oxford
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: small sticker residue on dj.
Few myths have haunted the Western imagination with the ferocity of Sophocles' Antigone — and in Antigones, George Steiner undertakes a monumental examination of why this single ancient drama has proven so inexhaustibly generative across more than two millennia of literature, philosophy, music, and art. Steiner chronicles the myth's extraordinary journey from its origins in Greek tragedy through its transformation in the hands of Hegel, Hölderlin, Brecht, Anouilh, and countless others, arguing that the confrontation between Antigone and Creon — between conscience and the state, between the laws of the gods and the laws of men — is the defining conflict of Western moral thought. Written with Steiner's characteristic erudition and fierce intellectual passion, Antigones is far more than a work of comparative literature; it is a sustained meditation on how civilisations inherit, reimagine, and are ultimately shaped by their mythological inheritance. Steiner presents a dazzling synthesis of classical scholarship, philosophy, and cultural criticism, revealing the Antigone myth as a kind of permanent ethical archive, one that each generation is compelled to reopen. For anyone who has ever grappled with duty, dissent, or mortality, this magisterial study leaves a haunting question: what does it mean that we keep returning to this one story?