I 'tria corda' di Elettra : memoria letteraria e crisi dell'io in 'Elektra' di Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1903)

The article provides further insight into the intertextual relationship between Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra and the Greek tragic versions of Electra’s myth (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides). A possibly original interpretative model is provided on the basis of the psychoanalitic concept of hysteria. Specifically, Hofmannsthal’s Electra is seen as ‘haunted’ by her tragic pre-existences, whose contradictory interactions below the surface of the text result into those 'abnormal’ peculiarities of the character already examined by scholars (‘metaliterary hysteria’).