SOURCE: Colakis, Marianthe. “The House of Atreus Myth in the Seventies and Eighties: David Rabe's The Orphan and Joyce Carol Oates's Angel of Light.” Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 9, no. 2 (winter 1989): 125-30.

In the following essay, Colakis compares the use of the House of Atreus myth in Rabe's The Orphan and Joyce Carol Oates's novel Angel of Light.

Even in the last two decades, when Greek myths are no longer a part of general knowledge, they have not lost their appeal to certain of our dramatists and novelists. When contemporary authors place timeless situations and characters in settings that reflect modern consciousness, we cease to think of myths as the lore of a bygone culture, and we feel anew their hold on our imaginations. This is particularly true of the House of Atreus myth; within the twentieth century alone it has appealed to otherwise diverse authors—von...