Modern Literature and the Tragic / / K. M. Newton.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2013-2000
• VerfasserIn: Newton, K. M.,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (192 p.)

GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748636730');This book explores modern literature's responses to the tragic. It examines writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century through to the later twentieth century who respond to ideas about tragedy.Although Ibsen has been accused of being responsible for the 'death of tragedy', Ken Newton argues that Ibsen instead generates an anti-tragic perspective that had a major influence on dramatists such as Shaw and Brecht. By contrast, writers such as Hardy and Conrad, influenced by Schopenhauerean pessimism and Darwinism, attempt to modernise the concept of the tragic. Nietzsche's revisionist interpretation of the tragic influenced writers who either take pessimism or the 'Dionysian' commitment to life to an extreme, as in Strindberg and D. H. Lawrence. Different views emerge in the period following the second world war with the 'Theatre of the Absurd' and postmodern anti-foundationalism.Key FeaturesBroad coverage of drama and fiction by British, European, and American writers Provides readings of particular texts including Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Ibsen's Ghosts, Strindberg's Miss Julie, Brecht's Mother Courage, Chekhov's Three Sisters, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Shaw's Saint Joan, Miller's Death of a Salesman, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and D H Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in LoveCombines literary interpretation with philosophical discussion, e.g. of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Derrida, Rorty"

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Ibsen’s Ghosts and the Rejection of the Tragic -- 2. Anti-Tragic Drama after Ibsen -- 3. Chekhov and the Tragic -- 4. The Return of the Tragic in Fiction -- 5. Nietzsche and the Redefining of the Tragic -- 6. The ‘Tragico-Dionysian’ and D. H. Lawrence -- 7. The Theatre of the Absurd and the Tragic -- 8. The Tragic, Pragmatism and the Postmodern -- Index