Oedipus and Aristotle; Freud and The Moonstone

Abstract

Sophocles’s Oedipus the King has acquired a special importance to our culture for two reasons only partly dependent on its merits as a play. The first is that it was the main model on which Aristotle based the generalisations of The Poetics, the founding work of Western literary theory. The second is that, as a text and not just as a story, it is the reference point for Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, and hence a cornerstone of psychoanalysis. The fact that it also has a strong formal resemblance to a detective story makes it a natural focus of attention in a discussion of the relations between detective fiction and literature.