Abstract

L. A. Swift's The Hidden Chorus: Echoes of Genre in Tragic Lyric is a lucidly written book that traces the transformations of lyric genres as constituents of tragedy. It offers a rich account and a brief review cannot do justice to the complexity of the discussion offered. The book, divided into seven chapters, begins with a thought-provoking discussion of the nature of lyric genres and maps eloquently the entanglements of definition endemic to those genres. Swift gives a valuable commentary on select ancient writings on the classification of genres and argues against tight definitions of same. Ancient writers had access to poetry, but not to the radically defining factor of the performative context. She then tackles the difficult question of what "counts as a genre," illustrating a case-study based on dithyrambos. The gap in the surviving fragments and the ancient discussions of the genres justifies Swift's choice to include this genre in her book. She aptly moves her discussion from the early to the evolved narrative poems and then to the New Music's "dithyrambic" style and connects it with her general topic by characterizing dithyrambos in terms a tragic audience would recognize. Swift demonstrates effectively that lyric genres are bound to their socio-cultural norms; tragic lyric is then put into the context of the community that brought its form to life.