Tragic Survivals: From the Hellenic to the Postmodern

Tragedy gestures towards annihilation, but ends in an inception. The tragic form, no less, is governed by this selfsame logic of survival. This book brings together a set of twenty seven essays by two authors- different in tone and style, expression and insight, tempered by each author’s timbre of thought – on the tenacity and survival of the originally impulses of tragic writing through the shaping and transfiguring influence of the ages. This suturing of tragedy’s response to its own time includes the golden age of fifth century Athenian tragedy, the shoals and reefs of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, the choppy waters of twentieth century tragic revivals and a meditation upon tragedy’s apotheosis in cinema. This book locates survival and freedom at the heart of the orgiastic, violent and repressive, and in so doing strikes a blow for injured integrity. Now, what could be more tragic and empowering?