In Paradise Lost, Adam asks, "Why do I overlive?" Adam's anguished question is the basis for a critical analysis of living too long as a neglected but central theme in Western tragic literature. Emily Wilson examines this experience in works by Milton and by four of his literary predecessors: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, and Shakespeare. Each of these writers composed works in which the central character undergoes unbearable suffering or loss, hopes for death, but goes on living. Mocked with Death makes clear that tragic works need not find their moral and aesthetic conclusion in death and that, in some instances, tragedy consists of living on rather than dying. Oedipus's survival at the end of Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus Coloneus is clearly one such instance; another Euripides' Heracles. In Seneca's Hercules Furens, overliving becomes an expression of anxieties about both political and literary belatedness. In King Lear and Macbeth, the sense of overliving produces a divided sense of self. For Milton, in both Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost, overliving is a theological problem arising from the tension between mortal conceptions of time and divine providence. Each writer in this tradition, Wilson concludes, attempts to diminish the anxieties arising from living past one's time but cannot entirely minimize them. Tragedies of overliving remain disturbing because they remind us that life is rarely as neat as we expect and hope it be and that endings often come too late.

An unexpectedly original contribution to a topic that would not seem any longer to admit of original contributions: the nature of the tragic as manifested in major canonical literary works from classical Antiquity and the English Renaissance. -- Gordon Braden, University of Virginia

About the Author
Emily R. Wilson is an assistant professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews
This book is partly, then, an exploration of figures whose continued lives (Oedipus, Heracles, Lear, Macbeth, Samson and Adam) seem offensive to the presiding powers and narrative decorum of their respective plays, but which may also offer energetic forms of interest and even consolation. As such it is wonderfully persuasive, clear and accessible. It also links the notion of overliving into wider currents of thought about tragedy. -- Raphael Lyne Times Literary Supplement 2005 Refreshing because it stimulates the reader to rethink familiar works and to question received concepts. -- Margaret J. Arnold Renaissance Quarterly 2005



Book Information
ISBN 9780801879647
Author Emily R. Wilson
Format Hardback
Page Count 304
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 544g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 23mm