Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Terry Eagleton's Tragedy provides a major critical and analytical account of the concept of 'tragedy' from its origins in the Ancient world right down to the twenty-first century.

A major new intellectual endeavour from one of the world's finest, and most controversial, cultural theorists. Provides an analytical account of the concept of 'tragedy' from its origins in the ancient world to the present day. Explores the idea of the 'tragic' across all genres of writing, as well as in philosophy, politics, religion and psychology, and throughout western culture. Considers the psychological, religious and socio-political implications and consequences of our fascination with the tragic.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Theory in Ruins
• 2 The Value of Agony
• 3 From Hegel to Beckett
• 4 Heroes
• 5 Freedom, Fate and Justice
• 6 Pity, Fear and Pleasure
• 7 Tragedy and the Novel
• 8 Tragedy and Modernity
• 9 Demons
• 10 Thomas Mann's Hedgehog

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

"The aspects of tragedy I have in mind take with utmost seriousness the lethal as well as life-giving inheritances of which the present is partly made up, and which an amnesiac postmodernism has conveniently suppressed." With chapters on "The Value of Agony," "Pity, Fear and Pleasure" and "Freedom, Fate and Justice," British literary critic and political theorist Eagleton (whose well-received memoir The Gatekeeper is just out from St.Martin's) runs through the West's tragic literature, from Sophocles to Ibsen and beyond, to begin constructing a new, tragically informed language for the political left: "Don't settle for that set of shabby fantasies known as reality, but cling to your faith that the deathly emptiness of the dispossessed is the only source from which a more jubilant, self-delighting existence can ultimately spring." (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

As a Marxist critic, Eagleton (cultural theory, Univ. of Manchester, UK) has both a political and literary agenda in this study of the idea of the tragic. In the political realm, his goal is to correct, even chastise, naive and insensitive approaches to the concept of tragedy taken by left-wing cultural critics who dismiss the genre as politically and socially irrelevant. Eagleton resists this position as superficial, because he sees tragedy as a profoundly important theme in human history--a theme that transcends chronological and political boundaries. He argues that many of his allies on the political left avoid considering the permanent, trans-historical aspects of the human condition (e.g., tragic suffering) because such universal themes conflict with political and social reality as they see it. Eagleton's refutation of this position takes the form of a virtuoso series of references to great tragedies in world literature in support of his position. Directed consciously at a specific political agenda, these references are too brief and incomplete to serve as literary criticism in the orthodox sense. Rather they form a set of sensitive and perceptive insights into great tragic literature from its origins in Greek civilization to the present. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All academic collections. L. Golden Florida State University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Terry Eagleton received a Ph.D from Cambridge University. He is a literary critic and a writer. He has written about 50 books including Shakespeare and Society, Criticism and Ideology, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Literary Theory, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Why Marx Was Right, The Event of Literature, and Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America. He wrote a novel entitled Saints and Scholars, several plays including Saint Oscar, and a memoir entitled The Gatekeeper. He is also the chair in English literature in Lancaster University's department of English and creative writing.

(Bowker Author Biography)