The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy

Cambridge Introductions to Literature

by Jennifer Wallace

Tragedy is the art-form created to confront the most difficult experiences we death, loss, injustice, thwarted passion, despair. From ancient Greek theatre up to the most recent plays, playwrights have found, in tragic drama, a means to seek explanation for disaster. But tragedy is also a word we continually encounter in the media, to denote an event which is simply devastating in its emotional power. This introduction explores the relationship between tragic experience and tragic representation. After giving an overview of the tragic theatre canon - including chapters on the Greeks, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, post-colonial drama, and Beckett - it also looks at the contribution which philosophers have brought to this subject, before ranging across other art-forms and areas of debate. The book is unique in its chronological range, and brings a wide spectrum of examples, from both literature and life, into the discussion of this emotional and frequently controversial subject.

Genres: Tragedy, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Criticism

252 pages, Paperback

First published May 21, 2007

Reviews

[Florence Ridley · Rating 5 out of 5]

As textbooks on tragedy go, this is about as thorough as an undergraduate student could desire. As a starting point for an undergraduate beginning the study of tragedy it would be hard to do better. Wallace is also an excellent lecturer.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

No attempt to deal with as huge a topic as tragedy satisfactorily in less than 200 pages is ever going to be wholly comprehensive, and a glance at the contents page, which shows "Psychoanalysis" awarded a mere six pages, along with four each for "Novels" and "Film", might suggest that this book is going to be fairly superficial. However, Wallace does a very good job not only of explaining her occasionally dense and necessarily complex material clearly, but perhaps more importantly organizing it coherently. The first half of the book focuses on drama, providing a roughly chronological survey of tragedy from the Greeks to Beckett, followed by "case studies" on two dramatic topics: physical violence, and language. The second half (which I approached with some trepidation that turned out to be pleasantly unfounded) does the same for tragic theory, with case studies on fate, politics, and gender following a survey of writing on tragedy from Aristotle to Girard. This approach works well, with even those final few apparently perfunctory chapters on non-dramatic tragedy proving enlightening thanks to the ground-breaking done by the weightier earlier sections. Readers with more than just a casual interest in any one of the individual sections may well find something to quibble with in the details - Are Throne of Blood and Ugetsu really the only two great Japanese films of the 1950s? - but as a whole this is a useful and readable introduction.

[M · Rating 2 out of 5]

As simultaneously comprehensive and detailed as possible in 200 odd pages, this is a good introduction to Tragedy for the reader with absolutely no previous knowledge of the topic. However, it also utterly lacks original thought and analytical skills - except for the bit where it tries to disprove Kierkegaard's entire thought system in half a page.