Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T12:25:06.873Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction: The Urgency of Tragedy Now

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Helene P. Foley  and
Jean E. Howard
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Tragedy—the word conjures up a multitude of associations, some clichéd. By calling something a tragedy, whether a literary work or an event in a person's or a society's experience, one may suggest suffering and trauma but also grandeur and endurance and nobility. A tragedy is something horrible and yet, paradoxically, edifying. For those who are morally inclined, it demonstrates the punishment that befalls the proud or the flawed; for those more fatalistic, it suggests humanity's unmerited but inevitable suffering in an indifferent universe. To some people, certainly, tragedy as a literary genre is old and boring, loved by the Greeks but of little relevance now.

Type
Special Topic: Tragedy Coordinated by Helene P. Foley and Jean E. Howard
Information
PMLA , Volume 129 , Issue 4: Special Topic Tragedy , October 2014 , pp. 617 - 633
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare Plays: Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Aebischer, Pascale. Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Altman, Joel. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Print.Google Scholar
Aristotle. Art of Rhetoric. Trans. Freese, J. H. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1926. Print.Google Scholar
Aristotle. Poetics. Ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell. Aristotle, Poetics; Longinus, On the Sublime; Demetrius, On Style. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Berry, Philippa. Shakespeare's Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Braden, Gordon. Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. Print.Google Scholar
Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. 1904. Greenwich: Fawcett, 1967. Print.Google Scholar
Brown, Sarah Annes, and Silverstone, Catherine. Tragedy in Transition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bushnell, Rebecca. A Companion to Tragedy. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Callaghan, Dympna. Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.Google Scholar
Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Condren, Conal. Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Print.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Farber, Yaël. Molora. London: Oberon, 2008. Print.Google Scholar
Felski, Rita, ed. Rethinking Tragedy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides' The Bacchae in a Globalizing World. Chichester: Wiley, 2014. Print.Google Scholar
Foley, Helene. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
Foley, Helene. “Generic Ambiguity in Modern Productions and New Versions of Greek Tragedy.” Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice. Ed. Hall, Edith and Harrop, Stephe. London: Duckworth, 2010. 137–52. Print.Google Scholar
Foster, Verna A. The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Gailey, Christine W. “Evolutionary Perspectives on Gender Hierarchy.” Analyzing Gender: A Handbook of Social Science Research. Ed. Hess, B. B. and Ferree, M. M. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1987. 32–67. Print.Google Scholar
Gailey, Christine W. Kinship to Kingship: Gender Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands. Austin: U of Texas P, 1987. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gambaro, Griselda. Antígona Furiosa. Information for Foreigners: Three Plays. Trans. Feitlowitz, Marguerite. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1992. 131–59. Print.Google Scholar
Goldhill, Simon. “Generalizing about Tragedy.” Felski 45–65.Google Scholar
Goldhill, Simon, and Osborne, Robin, eds. Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
Hall, Edith. “Is There a Polis in Aristotle's Poetics?” Tragedy and the Tragic. Ed. Silk, M. S. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 295–309. Print.Google Scholar
Hammond, Paul. The Strangeness of Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holst-Warhaft, Gail. Dangerous Voices: Women's Lament and Greek Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howard, Jean. “Interrupting the Lucrece Effect: The Performance of Rape Stories on the Early Modern Stage.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race. Ed. Valerie Traub. Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laera, Margherita. Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy. Bern: Lang, 2013. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liebler, Noami, ed. The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loraux, Nicole. The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City. Trans. Sheridan, Alan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Print.Google Scholar
Loraux, Nicole. The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy. Trans. Rawlings, E. T. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002. Print.Google Scholar
McDonald, Marianne. Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Nottage, Lynn. Ruined. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Felicity. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and Eighteenth-Century British Theater. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osofisan, Femi. Tegonni: An African Antigone. Recent Outings: Two Plays, Comprising, Tegonni: An African Antigone and Many Colours Make the Thunder-King. Ibadan: Opon IFA, 1999. 5–141. Print.Google Scholar
Poole, Adrian. Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reiss, Timothy. “Using Tragedy against Its Makers: African and Caribbean Instances.” Bushnell 505–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rotimi, Ola. The Gods Are Not to Blame. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971. Print.Google Scholar
Soyinka, Wole. The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite. New York: Norton, 1973. Print.Google Scholar
Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. 1961. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Taxidou, Olga. Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Visvardi, Eirene. Emotion in Action: Thucydides and the Tragic Chorus. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Wallace, Jennifer. The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Weimann, Robert. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Ed. Schwartz, Robert. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1966. Print.Google Scholar
Zeitlin, Froma I. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.Google Scholar