Oedipus (6)

Ranks 6th on The Fictional 100

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"With such clues I could not

fail to bring my birth to light."

The following books will introduce you to Oedipus, who said these words in Sophocles' Oedipus the King (see below)..

To order a book, or for more information, follow the book title links to Amazon.com, then return home to browse other characters.

• Sophocles. Sophocles I: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone (David Grene, Trans.; David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, Eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
  • Oedipus the King is the classic drama of incest, mistaken identity, and self-punishment, here in Grene's lucid and moving translation. Antigone tells about his ill-fated children, and Oedipus at Colonus finds Oedipus in old age--homeless, blind, and embittered.
    
• Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (James Strachey, Trans.). New York: Avon, 1983.
  • Includes Freud's controversial statement of the Oedipus complex.
    
• Cocteau, Jean. The Infernal Machine, and Other Plays. New York: Norton, 1964.
  • Cocteau's Freudian bent is apparent in his powerful rendering of Oedipus' tortured psyche. The scene where the young Oedipus confronts the Sphinx and her riddles is not to be missed.
    
• Kaufmann, Walter. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
  • Profound and provocative analyses of tragic characters, including Oedipus, from a truly gifted writer.
    
• Edmunds, Lowell and Dundes, Alan (Eds.). Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
  • Essays by an array of international scholars consider Oedipus-like folklore around the world.
    
• Edmunds, Lowell. Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
  • Variations on the Oedipus legend as it has travelled across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Edmunds considers over 70 works akin to the original Greek drama.
    
• Johnson, Allen W. and Price-Williams, Douglass. Oedipus Ubiquitous: The Family Complex in World Folk Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.
  • More family resemblances to the Oedipus clan in world folklore.

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