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. In doing so, Hoxby not only
illuminates masterpieces by Shakespeare, Calderon, Corneille,
Racine, Milton, and Mozart, he also revivifies a vast repertoire of
tragic drama and opera that has been relegated to obscurity by
critical developments since 1800. He suggests how many of these
plays might be reclaimed as living works of theater. And by
reconstructing a lost conception of tragedy both ancient and
modern, he illuminates the hidden assumptions and peculiar
blind-spots of the idealist critical tradition that runs from
Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel, through Wagner, Nietzsche, and
Freud, up to modern post-structuralism.
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