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Reader in Tragedy - An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory

English · Paperback / Softback

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This unique anthology presents the important historical essays on tragedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span, it traces the development of theories and philosophies of tragedy, enabling readers to consider the ways in which different varieties of environmentalist, feminist, leftist and postcolonial thought have transformed the status of tragedy, and the idea of the tragic, for recent generations of artists, critics and thinkers. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and 21st century theorists.

Ideas of tragedy and the tragic have been central to the understanding of culture for the past two millennia. Writers and thinkers from Plato through to Martha Nussbaum have analyzed the genre of tragedy to probe the most fundamental of questions about ethics, pleasure and responsibility in the world. Does tragedy demand that we enjoy witnessing the pain of others? Does it suggest that suffering is inevitable? Is human sexuality tragic? Is tragedy even possible in a world of rolling news on a digitally connected planet, where atrocity and trauma from around the globe are matters of daily information? In order to illustrate the different ways that writers have approached the answers to such questions, this Reader collects together a comprehensive selection of canonical writings on tragedy from antiquity to the present day arranged in six sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts.

List of contents










Acknowledgements
Notes on the Texts

General Introduction

Chapter One: Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Introduction
1.1. Plato, The Republic
1.2. Aristotle, On The Art Of Poetry
1.3. Horace, The Art of Poetry
1.4. Longinus, On the Sublime
1.5. Evanthius, "On Drama"
1.6. Augustine, "On Stage-plays"

Chapter Two: The Early Modern Period
Introduction
2.1. Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinthio, Discourse or Letter on the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies
2.2. Lodovico Castelvetro, The Poetics of Aristotle
2.3. Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions
2.4. Philip Sidney, Defense of Poetry
2.5. Thomas Heywood, The Apology for Actors
2.6. Pierre Corneille, from Three Discourses on Dramatic Poetry
2.7. John Milton, "Of That Sort of Dramatic Poem Which is Called Tragedy"
2.8. René Rapin, Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie
2.9. John Dryden, "The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy"

Chapter Three: The Eighteenth Century
Introduction
3.1. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator
3.2. George Lillo, "The Dedication" and "Prologue" to The London Merchant
3.3. David Hume, "Of Tragedy"
3.4. Edmund Burke, "Sympathy," "Of the Effects of Tragedy" and "The Sublime"
3.5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to M. D'Alembert On the Theatre
3.6. Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare"
3.7. Voltaire, "Letter XVIII. On Tragedy"
3.8. Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear
3.9 Joanna Baillie, "Introductory Discourse"

Chapter Four: The Nineteenth Century
Introduction
4.1. August Wilhelm Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature
4.2. Charles Lamb, "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare Considered with Reference for Their Fitness for Stage Representation"
4.3. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays
4.4. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry
4.5. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
4.6. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art
4.7. George Eliot, "The Antigone and its Moral"
4.8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Chapter Five: 1900 to 1968
Introduction
5.1. Sigmund Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams
5.2. A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy
5.3. William Butler Yeats, "The Tragic Theatre"
5.4. Virginia Woolf, "On Not Knowing Greek"
5.5. Bertolt Brecht, "A Short Organum for the Theatre"
5.6. Robert Warshow, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero"
5.7. George Steiner, Death of Tragedy
5.8. Raymond Williams, "Tragedy and Revolution"
5.9. Athol Fugard, "On A View from the Bridge"

Chapter Six: Post-1968
Introduction
6.1 Augusto Boal, from The Theatre of the Oppressed
6.2. René Girard, "The Sacrificial Crisis"
6.3. Joseph Meeker, "Literary Tragedy and Ecological Catastrophe"
6.4. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy
6.5. Biodun Jeyifo, "Tragedy, History and Ideology"
6.6. Nicole Loraux, The Rope and the Sword
6.7. Hélène Cixous, "Enter the Theatre (in between)"
6.8. Judith Butler, "Promiscuous Obedience"
6.9. Martha Nussbaum, "The 'Morality of Pity'"
6.10. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity

Permissions Acknowledgements
Supplementary Reading
Index


About the author

Marcus Nevitt is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK.Tanya Pollard is Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, she has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale, and has received awards including a Rhodes Scholarship, Guggenheim Fellowship, NEH Fellowship, NEH Public Scholars Grant, Mellon Fellowship, Whiting Fellowship, and Frances Yates Fellowship at the Warburg Institute. Her most recent monograph, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford, 2017), was warmly reviewed in periodicals including the TLS, the LRB, and numerous scholarly journals, and received the 2017 Roland H. Bainton Literature Book Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference for the best book published in English on early modern literature.

Tanya has given talks at Oxford, Cambridge, Shakespeare Institute, York and Sheffield – as well as post-show talks at Globe and RSC productions that travelled to New York. She is on American board of trustees for Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Summary

This unique anthology presents the important historical essays on tragedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span, it traces the development of theories and philosophies of tragedy, enabling readers to consider the ways in which different varieties of environmentalist, feminist, leftist and postcolonial thought have transformed the status of tragedy, and the idea of the tragic, for recent generations of artists, critics and thinkers. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and 21st century theorists.

Ideas of tragedy and the tragic have been central to the understanding of culture for the past two millennia. Writers and thinkers from Plato through to Martha Nussbaum have analyzed the genre of tragedy to probe the most fundamental of questions about ethics, pleasure and responsibility in the world. Does tragedy demand that we enjoy witnessing the pain of others? Does it suggest that suffering is inevitable? Is human sexuality tragic? Is tragedy even possible in a world of rolling news on a digitally connected planet, where atrocity and trauma from around the globe are matters of daily information? In order to illustrate the different ways that writers have approached the answers to such questions, this Reader collects together a comprehensive selection of canonical writings on tragedy from antiquity to the present day arranged in six sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts.

Foreword

Reader in Tragedy is a unique, valuable collection of the major theories and philosophies of tragedy from antiquity to the 21st century, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically.

Product details

Authors Marcus (University of Sheffield Nevitt
Assisted by Marcus Nevitt (Editor), Marcus (University of Sheffield Nevitt (Editor), Nevitt Marcus (Editor), Tanya Pollard (Editor), Tanya (Brooklyn College Pollard (Editor), Pollard Tanya (Editor)
Publisher Bloomsbury
 
Languages English
Product format Paperback / Softback
Released 28.02.2019
 
EAN 9781474270427
ISBN 978-1-4742-7042-7
No. of pages 360
Subjects Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies

LITERARY CRITICISM / Drama, LITERARY CRITICISM / Comparative Literature, PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / History & Criticism, Theatre Studies, Literary theory

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