Introduction

ENSophocles' Antigone is one of the most important cultural texts in Western civilization. It has been reinterpreted not only by classicists but also by poets from Hölderlin to Heaney, novelists such as Virginia Woolf and Grete Weil, philosophers including Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida, the psychoanalytic theorists Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, feminists and gender studies theorists Irigaray and Butler, and playwrights and theatre practitioners including Artaud, Brecht, Cocteau, Gide, Kantor, and Fugard. Antigone has received more than fifty translations into the English language in the last century and many adaptations all over the world. Why Antigone?. What unresolved questions lie in the play and why does the Antigone character still capture our imagination?.