The Encyclopedia of Greek Comedy: 3 Volume Set

Available online or as a 3–volume print set, The Encyclopedia of Greek Comedy is a comprehensive and accessible reference covering all of Greek comedy and its reception from antiquity to the present. Under the editorship of an esteemed expert in the field, it brings together the work of an international group of nearly 200 established and rising scholars.

The Encyclopedia contains more than 1300 entries, organized in A–Z format, with helpful cross–references and an index of authors and plays. The entries explore a wide range of topics, including the varieties and phases of the genre; the authors and their major plays; composition and technique; the relationship between comedy and society; the preservation and transmission of comic texts; responses to Greek comedy by artists from Plato to Picasso and beyond; and modern methods of literary analysis and criticism. Along with the latest scholarship on noted dramatists from Aristophanes and Eupolis to Menander and Philemon, the Encyclopedia provides extensive and detailed coverage of the work of those dramatists who have no complete plays extant. Broad in scope and authoritative in coverage, The Encyclopedia of Greek Comedy is an essential resource for anyone studying or researching in the field.

Alan H. Sommerstein is Emeritus Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham, where he taught for forty years. He is one of the foremost scholars working on Greek drama today and has written extensively on Greek drama, the oath in Greek society, and various related subjects. He has edited and translated more than 100 complete or fragmentary plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Menander. He has written and edited more than 40 books, including most recently, Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece (2014), Menander in Contexts (2014), Oath and State in Ancient Greece (2012), Aeschylean Tragedy (2010), The Tangled Ways of Zeus and Other Studies In and Around Greek Tragedy (2010), Talking about Laughter and Other Studies in Greek Comedy (2009), and Greek Drama and Dramatists (2002).