Interrogating liminality : threatening landscapes in fifth-century Greek tragedy

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the concept of liminal landscape in ancient Greek tragedy. Landscape studies are a growing area of research, offering valuable new insights into the ancient world; however, there is still a prevalent tendency for classical scholars to fall back on concepts popularised by structuralism in the 1980s. Discussions of landscape often seek to divide space according to binary oppositions, such as civilised/wild and centre/periphery. To demonstrate the wealth of meaning which is overlooked by this tendency, I explore three types of landscape from a variety of distinctive approaches which have been taken up in Classics more recently. First, using Julia Kristeva’s post- structuralist concept of abjection, I identify the sea as an unsettling symbol of boundlessness which threatens both the characters’ and the audience’s sense of self. Second, I analyse mountains using phenomenological theory, demonstrating how bodily experience and sensory perception facilitate memory in mountainous settings. Third, I consider meadows as literary devices, reconstructing unspoken patterns of thought using theory from cognitive linguistics, such as frame semantics and blending theory.

This method allows original readings of several plays (including Aeschylus’ Persians, and Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos and Trachiniae, Euripides’ Bacchae and Hippolytus) and a deeper understanding of the cultural perception of landscape. Rather than a broad reflection of symbolic binarism, I find that landscape is used in a variety of ways as a connective device. Integrating historical studies of the uses and experience of these landscapes, I show that landscape can connect places, experiences, and memories, immersing audiences in narrative space on a visceral level. The danger of “liminal” landscapes is often explained by distance and separation from the city; this study suggests instead that their foreboding atmospheres are caused more prominently by the reflections on the instability of human life and fortune which close interactions with landscape encourage.