L'Orfeo d'Irlanda: echi classici nell'opera di Seamus Heaney

La tesi si propone di indagare la massiccia presenza di rimandi classici, greci e latini, nell'opera di Seamus Heaney, con particolare attenzione alle poesie giovanili non incluse in raccolta. Attraverso la definizione di un personale "mythic method", Heaney elabora un'originale ars poetica, proponendo le sue composizioni come terreno per un confronto dialettico fra presente e passato.

The Politics of Re-(en)visioning: Contemporary British Rewritings of Greek and Roman Tragedies

This thesis examines three different kinds of socio-political rewritings of Greek and Roman tragedies – Sarah Kane’s “Phaedra’s Love”, Tony Harrison’s “Prometheus”, and Martin Crimp’s “Cruel and Tender” – written, staged or screened in Britain (and, more precisely, England) between 1996 and 2004. Offering close readings of these re-visionary appropriations, this dissertation analyses some of the innumerable and unexpected forms that ancient tragedy can assume today. In particular, it explores how three talented British authors have subverted the conventions of the noblest literary and dramatic genre in order to (re)write contemporaneity in ways that oscillate between the personal and the public, the local and the global, the national and the transnational.