Greek tragedy has held sway over the imagination of audiences for well over two millennia. This collection of essays on Athenian drama, the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, demonstrates that Greek tragedy still retains its power to provoke debate and to engage the interest of specialists and non-classicists alike.

The book includes essays by seven of the foremost scholars of Greek drama—Helene Foley, Michelle Gellrich, Peter W. Rose, David Rosenbloom, Richard Seaford, Bernd Seidensticker, and Froma I. Zeitlin. These writers explore the work of all three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and approach them from a variety of perspectives on history and theory, including poststructuralism and Marxism. They investigate the possibilities for coordinating theoretically informed readings of tragedy with a renewed attention to the pressure of material history within those texts. The collection thus represents a response within classics to "New Historicism" and the debates it has generated within related literary disciplines.

Barbara Goff is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Noose of Words: Readings of Desire, Violence and Language in Euripides’ ‘Hippolytos.’

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: History, Tragedy, Theory (Barbara Goff)
• 2. Interpreting Greek Tragedy: History, Theory, and the New Philology (Michelle Gellrich)
• 3. Historicizing Sophocles' Ajax (Peter W. Rose)
• 4. Myth, History, and Hegemony in Aeschylus (David Rosenbloom)
• 5. Tragedy and Democratic Ideology: The Case of Sophocles' Antigone (Helene Foley)
• 6. Women on the Tragic Stage (Bernd Seidensticker)
• 7. Art, Memory, and Kleos in Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis (Froma I. Zeitlin)
• 8. Historicizing Tragic Ambivalence: The Vote of Athena (Richard Seaford)
• Notes on Contributors
• Index