Picture 1 of 1

Stock photo

Killing Hercules: Deianira and the Politics of Domestic Violence, from Sophocles to the War on Terror by Richard Rowland (Hardcover, 2016)

1798books (215)

100% positive Feedback

Price:

£155.00

Free postage

Estimated delivery Wed, 25 Jun - Wed, 2 Jul

Returns:

30 days return. Buyer pays for return postage. If you use an eBay delivery label, it will be deducted from your refund amount.

Condition:

New

About this product

Product Information

This book offers an entirely new reception history of the myth of Hercules and his wife/killer Deianira. The book poses, and attempts to answer, two important and related questions. First, why have artists across two millennia felt compelled to revisit this particular myth to express anxieties about violence at both a global and domestic level? Secondly, from the moment that Sophocles disrupted a myth about the definitive exemplar of masculinity and martial prowess and turned it into a story about domestic abuse, through to a 2014 production of Handel's Hercules that was set in the context of the 'war on terror', the reception history of this myth has been one of discontinuity and conflict; how and why does each culture reinvent this narrative to address its own concerns and discontents, and how does each generation speak to, qualify or annihilate the certainties of its predecessors in order to understand, contain or exonerate the aggression with which their governors - of state and of the household - so often enforce their authority, and the violence to which their nations, and their homes, are perennially vulnerable?