Euripides turned to playwriting at a young age, achieving his first victory in the Athens' City Dionysia dramatic competitions in 441 BC. He would be awarded this honor three more times in his life, and once more posthumously. His plays are often ironic, pessimistic, and display radical rejection of classical decorum and rules. In 408 BC, Euripides left war-torn Athens for Macedonia, upon the invitation of King Archelaus, and there he spent his last...

The influence of Euripides on the development of the dramatic genre cannot be overstated. Along with Sophocles and Aeschylus he is regarded as one of the three great Greek tragedians from classical antiquity. One of the most important of Euripides' surviving dramas is "Medea", the story of its title character, the wife of Jason of the Argonauts, who seeks revenge upon her unfaithful husband when he abandons her for a another bride. Set in Corinth...

Fully entitled "Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty," this novel was Dickens' first attempt at a historical novel. As such, it is the precursor to his more famous "A Tale of Two Cities", in which his exploration of mob violence, and especially the effect of public events on individual lives, becomes apparent. This work centers on Barnaby Rudge, a mentally simple son, and his loving mother, who are a part of the small village of Epping Forest,...

"The Electra of Euripides has the distinction of being, perhaps, the best abused, and, one might add, not the best understood, of ancient tragedies. "A singular monument of poetical, or rather unpoetical perversity;" "the very worst of all his pieces;" are, for instance, the phrases applied to it by Schlegel. Considering that he judged it by the standards of conventional classicism, he could scarcely have arrived at any different conclusion. For it...

Immanuel's Kant's groundbreaking work, considered to be among the most influential philosophical texts in the Western canon Familiar to philosophy students through the centuries, The Critique of Pure Reason is in many ways Kant's magnum opus. First published in 1781, it seeks to define what can be known by reason alone without evidence from experience. Kant begins by defining a posteriori knowledge, which is gained through the senses, versus a priori...

Aeschylus was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays can still be read or performed, the others being Sophocles and Euripides. He is often described as the father of tragedy: our knowledge of the genre begins with his work and our understanding of earlier tragedies is largely based on inferences from his surviving plays. Only seven of his estimated seventy to ninety plays have survived into modern times. Fragments of some other...

Durante el otoño de 1912, en Praga, escribió Franz Kafka (1883-1924) La metamorfosis, la peripecia subterránea y literal de Gregor Samsa, un viajante de comercio que al despertarse una mañana "de un sueño lleno de pesadillas se encontró en su cama convertido en un bicho enorme". En pocos libros de Kafka queda tan explícito y tan nítido su mundo como en La metamorfosis, en la que el protagonista, convertido en bestia, sumido en la más absoluta...

Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him; of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived complete. Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances....

Considered the greatest Roman poet, Vergil spent over a decade working on this monumental epic poem, which has been a source of literary inspiration and poetic grandeur for more than 2,000 years. Its twelve books tell the heroic story of Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the burning ruins of Troy to found a new city in the west. This city, Lavinium, was the parent city of Rome. Drawn by divine destiny after the fall of Troy, Aeneas sailed westward toward...

In this new edition Musa views Dante's intention as one of cruel and comic commentary on the shallowness and self-pity of his protagonist, who only occasionally glimpses the true nature of love. ". . . the explication de texte which accompanies [Musa's] translation is instructively novel, always admirable. . . . This present work offers English readers a lengthy appraisal which should figure in future scholarly discussions." -Choice