Book excerpt: Along with democracy, tragedy is recognized as a genuine invention of the Athenians (fifth century BC). Indeed, what is now referred to often as the golden age of Ancient Greece is based on the development at the level of both the art and politics: tragic drama and the democratic form of government. The two cultural institutions then are rightly considered to be central elements of the Greek heritage . This collection seeks to complement and stimulate the broad interest in tragedy demonstrated in university curricula around the world. Both the ancient Greek plays and their successors such as Shakespeare in the Renaissance, or playwrights such as Brecht and Beckett in the twentieth century, have extended the range and complexity of the category of tragedy. What is being mapped in this collection of critical essays is the variety of ways in which teachers, students, and theatre practitioners now think, talk, produce and enact tragedies. Contributors to this anthology seek to achieve two broad aims. The first is to increase respect for the complexity of the texts themselves (albeit working mainly through the medium of translation) as well as a detailed understanding of their original context; the second is to adopt the position of contemporary readers who bring a range of contemporary theoretical approaches to bear in their search for meaning in these classical works. They include theatre theory and practice, feminism and gender sensitivity, new understandings of the very concepts of text and narrative and the impact on extra literary fields of knowledge such as psychoanalysis - all contribute to our reading of the genre of tragedy today. These in particular reflect some of the most exciting work on tragedy of the last fifty years. This collection is a collaborative Australian-Indian one. The location in different cultures of both the editors and contributors has enabled the range of essays represented in this Reader. What the collection foregrounds