This introduction explains (1) these authors’ fascination with Greek tragedy, (2) their modern reenvisioning of it in contrast to consolatory philosophies of tragedy and science, (3) their representation instead of a natural world that is a source of terror, and (4) their stand against nihilism in the face of such terror. My contention is that for Hardy, Woolf, Camus, and Beckett, tragedy is not a genre that defends or valorizes pain. Tragedy is a genre of insurrectionary truth-telling. I suggest that their tragic fiction models or incites desire for solidarity in the face of inhuman time scales and the destructiveness and chanciness of natural history. These writers recognize, too, that modern European history acts as (rather than banishes) tragic fatality. Engaging with tragedy, these authors devise strategies to evoke and indict both natural accident and manmade violence.

Woolf calls Hardy “the greatest tragic writer among English novelists,” and I argue that she shares his tragic sense. Both a “Dionysiac” view of time as unceasing flux (the view held by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Henri Bergson) and a mathematical view of time as abstract continuum (the view held by Bertrand Russell) make for tragedy in Woolf’s fiction. Her novels are devoid of the ritual and mythic consolations so often misattributed to ancient drama. Woolf’s Dionysiac time is severed from Dionysiac rituals’ cyclical renewals. Woolf’s mathematical time is severed from redemptive myth. Like Darwin, Woolf makes tragic chance inseparable from the theater of life. Woolf depicts the nonteleological, nonanthropocentric change and persistence of nonhuman nature, as well as the inhuman permanence of Russell’s “universals.” To the Lighthouse and The Waves set the “still space” of characters’ most cherished moments against “the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars.” Woolf’s fiction accentuates time’s passing and models characters’ Sisyphean resistance to it.