Dionysus after Nietzsche

Classics after Antiquity

by Adam Lecznar

Dionysus after Nietzsche examines the way that The Birth of Tragedy (1872) by Friedrich Nietzsche irrevocably influenced twentieth-century literature and thought. Adam Lecznar argues that Nietzsche's Dionysus became a symbol of the irrational forces of culture that cannot be contained, and explores the presence of Nietzsche's Greeks in the diverse writings of Jane Harrison, D. H. Lawrence, Martin Heidegger, Richard Schechner and Wole Soyinka (amongst others). From Jane Harrison's controversial ideas about Greek religion in an anthropological modernity, to Wole Soyinka's reimagining of a postcolonial genre of tragedy, each of the writers under discussion used the Nietzschean vision of Greece to develop subversive discourses of temporality, identity, history and classicism. In this way, they all took up Nietzsche's call to disrupt pre-existing discourses of classical meaning and create new modes of thinking about the Classics that speak to the immediate concerns of the present.

260 pages, Paperback

Published February 8, 2024

Reviews

[LC R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

[Anna Coopey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this!
Read to examine the place of Nietzsche in literature of the twentieth century, because he was so important to Kazantzakis and Sikelianos. Very interesting analysis, which I enjoyed very much.

[Jack Austen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dionysus After Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought offers an insightful, skillful and compelling analysis of the diverse ways in which an array of 20th century figures have used Nietzsche's Dionysus as a creative stimulus for the development of their own contemporary interpretations of Classical Greece.