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.

This study of tragic fiction in European modernism brings together novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a Darwinian vision of nature. To their minds, both tragedy and natural history disclosed unwarranted suffering at the center of life. Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett broke with entrenched philosophical and scientific traditions that sought to exclude chance, undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary biology. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel uncovers a temporality central to tragic novels' structure and ethics: that of the moment. These authors made novelistic plot the delivery system for lethal natural and historical forces, and then countered such plot with moments of protest - characters' fleeting dissent against unjustifiable harms.

Under the microscope of recent scholarship the universality of Greek tragedy has started to fade, as particularities of Athenian culture have come into focus. Miriam Leonard contests the idea of the death of tragedy and argues powerfully for the continued vitality and viability of Greek tragic theater in the central debates of contemporary culture.

This book brings together the study of modern fiction, tragedy, chance, and the natural world. It will appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in British and European modernism, philosophy, science and literature, and classical reception studies. It will also interest scholars studying the novel or tragedy more generally.

From an Existential Vacuum to a Tragic Optimism: The Search for Meaning and the Presence of God in Modern Literature employs a new theoretical approach to critical analysis: Victor Franklâ (TM)s logotherapy (from the Greek â oelogosâ for word or reason and often related to divine wisdom), a unique form of existentialism. On the basis of his observations of the power of human endurance and transcendence â " the discovery of meaning even in the midst of harrowing circumstances â " Frankl diagnoses the malaise of the current age as an â oeexistential vacuum, â a sense of meaninglessness. He suggests that a panacea for this malaise may be found in creativity, love, and moral choice â " even when faced with suffering or death. He affirms that human beings may transcend this vacuum, discover meaning â " or even ultimate meaning to be found in Ultimate Being, or God â " and live with a sense of â oetragic optimism.â This book observes both the current ageâ (TM)s â oeexistential vacuumâ â " a malaise of emptiness and meaninglessness â " and its longing for meaning and God as reflected in three genres: poetry, novel, and fantasy. Part I, â oeReflections of God in the Poetic Vision, â addresses â oetragic optimismâ â " hope when there seems to be no reason for hope â " in poems by William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Part II, â oeAmerican Angst: Emptiness and Possibility in John Steinbeckâ (TM)s Major Novels, â presents a study of Steinbeckâ (TM)s The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Winter of Our Discontent â " novels that together form a uniquely American epic trilogy. Together these novels tell the story of a nationâ (TM)s avarice, corruption, and betrayal offset by magnanimity, heroism, and hospitality. Set against the backdrop of Franklâ (TM)s ways of finding meaning and fulfillment â " all obliquely implying the felt presence of God â " the characters are representative Every Americans, in whose lives are reflected a nationâ (TM)s worst vices and best hopes. Part III, â oeA Tragic Optimism: The Triumph of Good in the Fantasy Worlds of Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling, â defines fantasy and science fiction as mirrors with which to view reality. J. R. R. Tolkienâ (TM)s The Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewisâ (TM)s That Hideous Strength, and J. K. Rowlingâ (TM)s Harry Potter series are considered in the light of Franklâ (TM)s logotherapy â " providing paths to meaning and the ultimate meaning to be found in God. In a postmodern, fragmented age, these works affirm a continuing vision of God (often through His felt absence) and, also, a most human yearning for meaning even when there seems to be none â " providing, as Frankl maintains, â oea tragic optimism.â

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, and has been expressed theatrically since the time of the ancient Greeks. However, it was in the Europe of the twentieth century – one of the most violent periods of human history – that the tragic form significantly developed. ‘Modern European Tragedy’ examines the consciousness of this era, drawing a picture of the development of the tragic through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding texts.

In Modern Tragedy, Williams bridges the gap between literary and socio-economic study, tracing the notion of tragedy from its philosophical and dramatic origins with Aristotle. In addition, Williams discusses tragedy in Chaucher, Nietzche, Brecht, Sartre and other leading figures in the history of thought, as well as elements of tragic experience – both political and personal - in socialist revolutions of the 20th century.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of "the literary" has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognized as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. This short but thought-provoking volume asks the question, "What is it that tragedy makes us know?" The focus is on tragedy as a mode of representing the experience of radical suffering, pain, or loss, a mode of narrative through which we come to know certain things about ourselves and our world--about its fragility and ours. Through a mixture of historical discussion and close reading of a number of dramatic texts--from Sophocles to Sarah Kane--the book addresses a wide range of debates: how tragedy is defined, whether there is such a thing as "absolute tragedy," various modern attempts to rework the classical heritage and the relation of comedy to tragedy. There is also a fresh discussion of whether religious--particularly Christian--discourse is inimical to the tragic and of the necessary tension between tragic narrative and certain kinds of political as well as religious rhetoric. Rowan Williams argues that tragic drama both articulates failure and frailty and, in affirming the possibility of narrating the story of traumatic loss, refuses to settle for passivity, resignation, or despair. In this sense, it still shows the trace of its ritual and religious roots. And in challenging two-dimensional models of society, power, humanity and human knowing, it remains an intrinsic part of any fully humanist culture.

Why did Greek tragedy and "the tragic" come to be seen as essential to conceptions of modernity? And how has this belief affected modern understandings of Greek drama? In Genealogy of the Tragic, Joshua Billings answers these and related questions by tracing the emergence of the modern theory of the tragic, which was first developed around 1800 by thinkers associated with German Idealism. The book argues that the idea of the tragic arose in response to a new consciousness of history in the late eighteenth century, which spurred theorists to see Greek tragedy as both a unique, historically remote form and a timeless literary genre full of meaning for the present. The book offers a new interpretation of the theories of Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, and others, as mediations between these historicizing and universalizing impulses, and shows the roots of their approaches in earlier discussions of Greek tragedy in Germany, France, and England. By examining eighteenth-century readings of tragedy and the interactions between idealist thinkers in detail, Genealogy of the Tragic offers the most comprehensive historical account of the tragic to date, as well as the fullest explanation of why and how the idea was used to make sense of modernity. The book argues that idealist theories remain fundamental to contemporary interpretations of Greek tragedy, and calls for a renewed engagement with philosophical questions in criticism of tragedy.