Antigone Uninterrupted

This book argues that while current scholarship on Antigone tends to celebrate work that takes Antigone out of her classical roots and puts her into contemporary frameworks, we do not need to place her in a new context and setting to appreciate what her insights offer. We can simply listen to her whole story and learn from what she learns from her father, Oedipus.

While other works boldly claim to be progressively moving beyond the scope of tragic themes of mortality, Antigone Uninterrupted demonstrates that reading the Theban Plays in the order of Antigone’s biography (so to speak) expands our understanding of what Antigone could tell us about contemporary issues. This demonstration involves Hegel’s discussion of Antigone in his Phenomenology of Spirit, responses to Hegel on this point, and the author’s assessment that Antigone makes arguments in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus that ought to be illuminated in contemporary scholarship. This book examines the three Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone) in the order by which Antigone’s story is a continuous development of character and age, a unique approach for reasons the author identifies, but one she argues would be beneficial to future scholarship.

Providing illuminating readings of both Sophocles’ tragedies and some key modern interpretations of the plays, this book holds broad appeal for those interested in subjects such as political science, gender theory, queer theory, literary criticism, theology, and sociology, to name a few.

Preface
Introduction
Chapter I Antigone’s Eternal Presence
Chapter II Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Antigones
Chapter III Antigone and Creon in the Theban Plays
Chapter IV Post-Modern Antigones
Chapter V Antigone and Polyneices in the Theban Plays
Chapter VI Millennial Antigones
Chapter VII Antigone and Ismene in the Theban Plays
Chapter VIII Antigone’s Tragic Counsel
Conclusion
References
Index

Wendy Bustamante earned her PhD in Philosophy from Texas A&M University, with a particular interest in Ancient Philosophy, Continental Philosophy (especially Existentialist Philosophy), and Philosophy of Literature. Upon graduation, Dr Bustamante also earned an additional MA in English, for which she wrote a creative thesis, and continues to write creative fiction inspired by Attic tragedy alongside her scholarship on Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’.

Contemporary aesthetics, Antigone, ancient drama, Thebes, Oedipus, Sophocles and humanism, tragedy and philosophy, Antigone today, tragedy and virtues, ancient thought today, Greek wisdom, tragic cheerfulness, tragic pleasures, Hegel, Butler, Lacan, psychoanalytic theory and Greek tragedy, Haemon, Polyneices, Polynices, women rebels, women martyrs, Antigone and political theory, Antigone and philosophy, Antigone and gender