The Senecan Aesthetic
A Performance History
Helen Slaney
Reviews and Awards
"In addition to offering 'traditional' classicists -- that is to say, for the most part, readers of Seneca -- a new interpretative approach to the tragedies, this volume should also constitute a signifcant contribution to classical performance reception studies." -- Emma Buckley, Language and Literature
"Remarkable and very appreciable ... is the effort to renew the study of the senequista theater and its successors and force the reader to value otherwise certain phenomena already well known as rhetoric pathetic, the metatheality and also the dynamic structure that drives to the Senecan characters of the furor al scelus nefas (the monstrous crime). ... Undoubtedly, his greatest achievement consists in proposing, from Seneca, a diachronic reflection on the essence of the theater that goes beyond the aesthetic framework to interrogate also their anthropological foundations." --Florence d'Artois, Bulletin of the Comediantes
"a welcome addition to the growing body of work on the reception of Senecan tragedy and the plays' performance history ... Slaney provides an excellent history of the reception of Senecan drama since the early modern period. She is particularly sensitive to how complex this history is, especially during periods when Seneca was officially out of favour." --Christopher Star, Classical Journal Online