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THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 37
while the consistent attention to perjury and its consequences is excellent, it is unclear why, when the mere threat of perjury is fatal in the case of Hippolytus (p. 191), there are no consequences at all for the weakening of female resolve in Lysistrata (p. 236).
Notwithstanding such reservations, the interpretations laid out are consistently stimulating, and the study admirably succeeds in setting dramatics oaths in their ancient contexts.
University of Manitoba C . M I C H A E L S A M P S O N mailto:mike.sampson@ad.umanitoba.ca
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H U M O U R A N D P O L I T I C S
R U F F E L L ( I . A . ) Politics and Anti-Realism in Athenian Old Comedy.
The Art of the Impossible. Pp. xii + 499, figs. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011. Cased, 70, US$160. ISBN: 978-0-19-958721-6.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X12002247
During the last few decades, comedy has received increased attention within Classical Studies. Humour, however, as a head-on aspect of the genre, has been largely neglected apart from in recent sophisticated studies of fragments (S.D. Olson [2007]; E. Bakola [2009]) and sporadic systematic approaches (M.S. Silk [2000]; L. OHiggins [2003];J. Robson [2006]), with the majority of scholars drawing upon Incongruity theories and the Bakhtin Circle. This book, published under the Oxford Classical Monograph Series, offers a fresh perspective. R.s aim is to explain the complex relationship between humour and politics; he therefore combines theoretical analysis applied to selected close readings with the cognitive responses and the role of the audience. Its origins lie in R.s M.St. thesis on metatheatricality in the fragments of Old Comedy as well as his D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 2000). The in-depth examination of politics within the genre has been a later addition inspired by R.s experience of contemporary politics in Glasgow.R. argues that if scholars hypothesise fictionality they can also hypothesise humour, as they both involve complex accounts of audience processing. The core of his study comprises questions of ideology, identity, social and political structure and popular culture, with the last elaborated specifically around self-referencing and the audience. His aim is to investigate the principal areas of impossibility in which Old Comedy operated.R. draws together three parallel...