Drawing on more than seventy works that dispersed the Oedipus legend from Greece to Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Edmunds provides a foundation for discussion of the lasting appeal of this legend, for claims of its universality, and for its uses as a vehicle for personal and cultural expression.

The power of the Oedipus legend is apparent not only in its interpretations but even more so in its variations. As Edmunds writes, "Translations, adaptations, and performances still come forth in a never-ending stream. Again and again, playwrights have tried their hand at new shapings of the Sophoclean Oedipuses and often a country's Oedipus forms a whole chapter in the history of its literature." Drawing on more than seventy works that dispersed the Oedipus legend from Greece to Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Edmunds provides a foundation for discussion of the lasting appeal of this legend, for claims of its universality, and for its uses as a vehicle for personal and cultural expression.

Drawing on more than seventy works that dispersed the Oedipus legend from Greece to Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Edmunds provides a foundation for discussion of the lasting appeal of this legend, for claims of its universality, and for its uses as a vehicle for personal and cultural expression.

About the Author

Francis Mark Mondimore, M.D., is a practicing psychiatrist in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a member of the clinical faculty of the University of North Carolina-ChapelHill. He is author of Depression, The Mood Disease, also available from Johns Hopkins.

Reviews
Edmunds is a classical philologist whose wide critical reading in the scholarship of other disciplines pertaining to Oedipus, together with his mastery of the popular analogues, has enabled him to direct corrective criticisms at Freud, Vladimir Propp, Levi-Strauss, and many an interpreter of Sophocles, always with a disarming modesty and circumspection.
-Classical Views
All who study and teach Greek texts touching on Oedipus should look into this book.
-Classical World



Book Information
ISBN 9781421437187
Author Lowell Edmunds
Format Paperback
Page Count 268
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 318g