Radu Stanca’s <i>Oedipus Saved</i> : Redemption, Aesthetic Sovereignty, and the End of Tragedy

Abstract The article examines Radu Stanca’s Oedipus Saved as a radical modernist reconfiguration of the Oedipal myth and a deliberate interruption of the classical tragic paradigm. Rejecting the fatalistic logic that defines Sophoclean and post-Sophoclean versions of the myth, Stanca imagines an Oedipus who is redeemed rather than destroyed, shifting the emphasis from divine determinism to human agency, solidarity, and ethical self-understanding. Drawing on the conceptual framework of Franco Moretti’s theory of “tragic sovereignty,” the study situates Oedipus Saved within the Sibiu Literary Circle’s aesthetic ideology, arguing that Stanca’s play replaces the traditional deconsecration of sovereignty with its aesthetic transfiguration. Through extensive intertextual engagement and mythopoetic innovation, Stanca reopens the tragic form to the possibility of metaphysical survival, rather than inevitable catastrophe. The article demonstrates that Oedipus Saved marks both a continuation and a rupture within European tragic discourse: it revives myth only to transform it into a modernist salvific narrative, where poetry and human insight triumph over the destructive logic of fate.