Antigones.

Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984. 1st ed. 316p. Original blue gilt titled hard bound with pictorial dust wrps. Upper edge a little bit rust stained. Stamp on free endpaper. ?Professor Steiner?s interesting ?Antigones? (?) is not an account of the Antigone theme and motif in western literature (?) though by judicious selection he documents and illustrates much of its range (?). Nor is it quite an analysis of the Antigone myth (?). It is rather, in his own words, ?a study of the interactions between a major text and its interpretations across time?, in which he considers interpretations of Sophocles? Antigone in the field of moral philosophy, political theory and metaphysics as well as poetry and drama, and among scholars, critics and translators of Sophocles. In the first of three long untitled chapters, Steiner discusses the impact of Sophocles ?Antigone? on the nineteenth century, especially on Hegel, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin and (?) Goethe. In the second, he considers a series of aspects including burial of the dead, Ismene, Antigone?s relationship to Haemon and Polyneices, the chorus and Creon. (?) In the final chapter, he essentially offers his own understanding and interpretation (in which the past is viewed, but not explicitly presented, as ?an active embodiment within current judgment?) of parts of Sophocles? Antigone (?) seen as expressing all the principal constants of conflicts in the condition of man.? Perhaps the chief difficulty with this richly laden and ingeniously organised study of interpretations of Sophocles? Antigone is that it contains much that throws little light on the play, and leaves untouched or unexamined much that calls for analysis. (?) But the book is full of acute insights and challenging observations.? (A.E. HINDS in Hermathena, 1987, pp.74-75).