Greek tragedy and the politics of subjectivity in recent fiction

Abstract

This article attempts to foster interest in the under-researched area of the relationship between ancient Greek tragedy and recent fiction, while demonstrating the complexity of the practice of research into classical reception through a particular case study. It identifies a cluster of characteristics shared by some important and politically engaged works of fiction, dating from the late 1970s, which use Euripidean tragedy in order to draw attention to the epistemological issue of narrative control. These include novels by Imre Kertész, Ismail Kadare, Christa Wolf and Barry Unsworth. It is argued through comparison with mid-twentieth-century manifestations of Greek tragedy in fiction, which focused on ontological concerns, that in a new development tragedy is used to read history epistemologically and ethically ‘against its grain’ in the Benjaminian sense.