What Was Tragedy?: Theory and the Early Modern Canon

Synopsis

Twentieth Century Critics Have Definite Ideas About Tragedy. They Maintain That In A True Tragedy, Fate Must Feel The Resistance Of The Tragic Hero's Moral Freedom Before Finally Crushing Him, Thus Generating Our Ambivalent Sense Of Terrible Waste Coupled With Spiritual Consolation. Yet Far From Being A Timeless Truth, This Account Of Tragedy Only Emerged In The Wake Of The French Revolution. 'what Was Tragedy?' Demonstrates That This Account Of The Tragic, Which Has Been Hegemonic From The Early Nineteenth Century To The Present Despite All The Twists And Turns Of Critical Fashion In The Twentieth Century, Obscured An Earlier Poetics Of Tragedy That Evolved From 1515 To 1795. By Reconstructing That Poetics, Blair Hoxby Makes Sense Of Plays That Are Merely Pathetic, Not Truly Tragic, Of Operas With Happy Endings, Of Christian Tragedies, And Of Other Plays That Advertised Themselves As Tragedies To Early Modern Audiences And Yet Have Subsequently Been Denied The Palm Of Tragedy By Critics.0. I. The Philosophy Of The Tragic And The Poetics Of Tragedy -- 1. Our Tragic Culture -- The Early Modern Conception Of Tragedy -- The Philosophy Of The Tragic -- Literary Form, The Philosophy Of History, And The Canon -- Tragedy Born Anew From The Spirit Of Music? -- Decadence And Primitivism -- The Post-structural Assault On Tragic Freedom -- Reassessing The Legacy Of Idealism -- Approaching The World We Have Lost -- 2. An Early Modern Poetics Of Tragedy -- Definitions -- The Objects Of Tragic Imitation -- Fables -- Manners -- Sentiments -- Diction -- The Player's Passions -- Spectacle -- The Chorus -- Tragic Pleasure -- Ii. The World We Have Lost -- 3. Simple Pathetic Tragedy -- Classical Exemplars -- Recovery And Invention: Trissino's Sofonisba (1515) -- A Theoretical Interlude -- Racine's Bérénice (1670) -- Milton's Samson Agonistes (1671) -- Simplicity And Reformation -- Gluck's Alceste (1779) -- La Harpe's Philoctète (1781) -- From Pathos To Moral Freedom -- 4. Operatic Discoveries: The Complex Tragedy With A Happy Ending -- Did Tragic Heroes Sing? -- Euripides And The Operatic Repertoire -- The Euripidean Tragedy Of Anticipated Woe -- Idomeneo And The Tragedy Of Averted Sacrifice -- 5. Counter-reformation Tragedy: The Laurel And The Cypress -- Tragedy As Spiritual Exercise -- Jesuit Defenses Of Counter-reformation Tragedy -- Enlightened Critiques And Idealist Defenses -- Final Reckonings -- 6. History As Tragedy, Tragedy As Design: Where Shakespeare And Dryden Part Company -- Antony And Cleopatra As A Great Occurence -- The Art Of Portraiture -- Sublimity Raised From The Very Elements Of Littleness -- Dryden's Artificial Order -- Portraiture And History Painting -- Tides That Swell And Retire To Seas -- Language -- The World Well Lost -- Tragedy And History. Blair Hoxby. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.