Tragedy and Social Evolution

by Eva Figes

Discusses the role Greek, Elizabethan, and later tragedy played in society, as well as society's effect on the drama, with regard to tribal belief, kingship, the dead, women, and social order

Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Eva Figes (born Eva Unger) is a German-born English author.

Figes has written novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. She arrived in Britain in 1939 with her parents and a younger brother. Figes is now a resident of north London and the mother of the academic Orlando Figes and writer Kate Figes.

In the 1960s she was associated with an informal group of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall, which included Stefan Themerson, Ann Quin and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.

Figes's fiction has certain similarities with the writings of Virginia Woolf. The 1983 novel, Light, is an impressionistic portrait of a single day in the life of Claude Monet from sunrise to sunset.

Reviews

[Mora]

i liked the "kingship" and "order and hierarchy" chapters the best, and i thought the latter did a good job of connecting and broadening out what figes had been talking about throughout into tragedy as an overall concept. not explicitly a shakespeare book but the examples figes used were from ancient greek and early modern drama. gave some nice historical context for why tragedy worked in each of these eras, and how certain techniques would have been recieved by a contemporary audience.