Origin of German Tragic Drama

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.

About the author

WALTER BENJAMIN (1892-1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Among his best-known works are 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' and essays on Kafka, Proust, Baudelaire and the storyteller. His masterwork, the Arcades Project, which intended to present a cultural theory of modernity through a study of nineteenth-century Paris, remained unfin­ished at his death.George Steiner, author of dozens of books (The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, Heidegger, In Bluebeard's Castle, My Unwritten Books, George Steiner at the New Yorker), is Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University.

Summary

Benjamin's most sustained and original work, and one of the main sources of literary modernism

Product details

• Authors: Walter Benjamin, Benjamin Walter
• Assisted by: Steiner George (Introduction), John Osborne (Translation), Osborne John (Translation)
• Publisher: Verso
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.08.2023
• EAN: 9781804290460
• ISBN: 978-1-80429-046-0
• No. of pages: 256
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > German linguistics / literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / Drama, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / German, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, german, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Literary studies: plays & playwrights, Literary studies: plays and playwrights