Reader in Tragedy : An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory

This unique anthology presents the important historical essays on tragedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span, it traces the development of theories and philosophies of tragedy, enabling readers to consider the ways in which different varieties of environmentalist, feminist, leftist and postcolonial thought have transformed the status of tragedy, and the idea of the tragic, for recent generations of artists, critics and thinkers. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and 21st century theorists.

Ideas of tragedy and the tragic have been central to the understanding of culture for the past two millennia. Writers and thinkers from Plato through to Martha Nussbaum have analyzed the genre of tragedy to probe the most fundamental of questions about ethics, pleasure and responsibility in the world. Does tragedy demand that we enjoy witnessing the pain of others? Does it suggest that suffering is inevitable? Is human sexuality tragic? Is tragedy even possible in a world of rolling news on a digitally connected planet, where atrocity and trauma from around the globe are matters of daily information? In order to illustrate the different ways that writers have approached the answers to such questions, this Reader collects together a comprehensive selection of canonical writings on tragedy from antiquity to the present day arranged in six sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts.

Tanya Pollard is Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, she has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale, and has received awards including a Rhodes Scholarship, Guggenheim Fellowship, NEH Fellowship, NEH Public Scholars Grant, Mellon Fellowship, Whiting Fellowship, and Frances Yates Fellowship at the Warburg Institute. Her most recent monograph, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford, 2017), was warmly reviewed in periodicals including the TLS, the LRB, and numerous scholarly journals, and received the 2017 Roland H. Bainton Literature Book Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference for the best book published in English on early modern literature.

Tanya has given talks at Oxford, Cambridge, Shakespeare Institute, York and Sheffield – as well as post-show talks at Globe and RSC productions that travelled to New York. She is on American board of trustees for Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.