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Politics and Anti-realism in Athenian Old Comedy: The Art of the Impossible . By Ian Ruffell . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2011. Pp. 499. £74 Hb.
Although not directed at theatre professionals or contemporary audiences of Aristophanic performance, this rich academic study of the intellectual and political context of the plays undertakes an important investigation of the role and function of comic dramatic narratives. Richly steeped in classical scholarship and certainly offering a challenging read for the non-classicist, Ruffell refreshingly connects Platonic theories of art and letters with familiar cultural references to cinema and television, from Airplane! to Monty Python and South Park; both historical and modern comic material is deconstructed and analysed from various critical and semiotic viewpoints.
Ruffell's aims are clear: 'to investigate, analyse and relate the principal areas of impossibility in which Attic Old Comedy, not least Aristophanes, operated'...