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John Kerrigan. Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. xv + 404 + 8 illus. $70.00.
Kerrigan's exhaustive study of revenge in (predominantly) Western art and culture transcends even the widely-spaced limits predicted by its title. This four-part, fourteen-chapter volume begins by closely analyzing Greek representations of revenge and their influence on later art. But its last five chapters refocus the book's lens on revenge as a human impulse rather than as a literary and dramatic genre, with secondary attention to revenge's artistic manifestations. In these last chapters, Kerrigan identifies popular revolutionary vengefulness (explored by the English Romantic poets), the Cold War vengefulness that threatened nuclear destruction ("Armageddon"), and feminist vengefulness (evident in modern adaptations of the Medea myth). He ends in the aether of contemporary philosophy, with an analysis of Martha Nussbaum, Bernard Williams, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, thinkers who (like Aristotle) mix case studies from literature and life in their ethical arguments. Indeed, the very breadth of this book suggests its own interpretive claims not just for literature but for the domains of anthropology, history, and ethics. It comes close to being a philosophical work in its own right.
That is not, however, to say that the book's philosophical part is its strongest part, for I found the reverse to be true. Most fascinating are Kerrigan's earliest chapters, wherein he provides original and sometimes startling links between the oldest revenge tragedy and more recent works of fiction, painting, opera, and film. Aeschylus's Oresteia, a work deeply concerned with ritual bloodletting and purification, is compared with the Dracula legend's...