Society, family and desire in the contemporary rewritings of the Oresteia in Europe.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the reception of the Oresteia in the 21st century in Europe. We will look at the representation of society, family and desire in plays written in Italy, the UK and France since 2000, referring to the Aeschylean trilogy. After an introduction in semiotics (supported by the theories of Greimas and Ubersfeld), the first part of this thesis will look at the representation of politics and religion. In regards to religion, we will study how the adaptations deal with the evolution of belief in society. We will focus on the characters of Cassandra and the Furies. The aim of this chapter is to show how religion is losing its power in contemporary society. The last chapter of the first part will focus on the representation of political power. In particular we will look at the portrayal of war, the life of soldiers and the function of royalty in contemporary rewriting. The second part will focus on the family. We will start by looking at Agamemnon as a father. Then, we will analyse the representation of motherhood provided by the plays of our corpus. In the end, we will interpret the offspring of the royal couple thanks to the concept of heritage and its adaptations in contemporary rewritings of the trilogy. Throughout a psychanalytical approach, we will interpret the guilt and culpability of each member of the family in relation to the murders that compose the story of this myth. The conclusions of this thesis will merge every single topic studied in this work to offer a complete fresco of the contemporary reception of this trilogy. The purpose of this work is to look at the variations in the representation of the symbolic in the reception of the contemporary rewritings of the ancient trilogy.