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

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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.

Author(s): Marcus Nevitt, Tanya Pollard
Publisher: Methuen Drama
Year: 2019

Language: English
Pages: 354
City: London

Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on the Texts
General Introduction
Chapter 1: Antiquity and the Middle Ages
[Book Three.]
Book Ten
The Art of Poetry
Chap. II. – In public spectacles he is moved by an empty compassion. He is attacked by a troublesome spiritual disease.
Chapter 2: The Early Modern Period
I.9. History and the Arts and Sciences Not Fit Subjects for Poetry
III.11 Happiness and Misery as Ends of Tragedy and Comedy
III.14.
III.5b, ‘It Must Have Magnitude’
III.5c, It Must Have Unity
III.10. Tragic Pleasure and the Spectacle
V.2a. Epic poetry
‘On Tragedy and the Means of Treating It according to Verisimilitude or “the Necessary”’
From ‘On the Three Unities: Of Action, of Time, and of Place’
Chapter 3: The Eighteenth Century
No. 39: Saturday, 14 April 1711
No. 40: Monday, 16 April 1711
No. 418. Monday, 30 June 1712
Prologue
PART I
PART II
Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century
Lecture V
Chapter 5:1900 to 1968
LECTURE I
PROLOGUE
Tragedy and Revolution
Chapter 6: POST-1968
The Ultimate Aim of Tragedy
Literary Tragedy and Ecological Catastrophe
6.1 An Uncertain Place
6.3 A Question of Patience
The Rope and the Sword
The Pity Debate
Arguing against Pity
Supplementary Reading
List of Sources
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Permissions Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Index