Description:
This volume traces a path across the metamorphoses of tragedy and the tragic in Western cultures during the bourgeois age of nations, revolutions, and empires, roughly delimited by the French Revolution and the First World War. Its starting point is the recognition that tragedy did not die with Romanticism, as George Steiner famously argued over half a century ago, but rather mutated and dispersed, converging into a variety of unstable, productive forms both on the stage and off. In turn, the tragic as a concept and mode transformed itself under the pressure of multiple social, historical and political-ideological phenomena. This volume therefore deploys a narrative centred on hybridization extending across media, genres, demographics, faiths both religious and secular, and national boundaries. The essays also tell a story of how tragedy and the tragic offered multiple means of capturing the increasingly fragmented perception of reality and history that emerged in the 19th century.
Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.Brief description: Michael Gamer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is author of Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (2000). He is Associate Editor of the journal EIR: Essays in Romanticism and editor of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (2002) and Charlotte Smith's Manon L'Escaut and the Romance of Real Life (2005). He has co-edited The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (edited with Jeffrey Cox, 2003) and Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800 (with Dahlia Porter, 2008).