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K. M. Newton, Modern Literature and the Tragic

K. M. Newton, Modern Literature and the Tragic

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de Columbia University Press)

NEWTON, K. M., Modern Literature and the Tragic, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2008, 192 p.
ISBN 978-0-7486-3673-0

RÉSUMÉ

This book explores modern literature's responses to the tragic. Itexamines writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century throughto the later twentieth century who respond to ideas about tragedy.

AlthoughIbsen has been accused of being responsible for the 'death of tragedy',Ken Newton argues that Ibsen instead generates an anti-tragicperspective that had a major influence on dramatists such as Shaw andBrecht. By contrast, writers such as Hardy and Conrad, influenced bySchopenhauerean pessimism and Darwinism, attempt to modernise theconcept of the tragic. Nietzsche's revisionist interpretation of thetragic influenced writers who either take pessimism or the 'Dionysian'commitment to life to an extreme, as in Strindberg and D. H. Lawrernce.Different views emerge in the period following the second world warwith the 'Theatre of the Absurd' and postmodern anti-foundationalism.

BIOGRAPHIE

Professor Ken Newton teaches at the University of Dundee. Hespecialises in nineteenth and twentieth century literature and literarytheory. He has published several books on George Eliot and numerousarticles on her and nineteenth-century fiction generally, as well asbooks, articles, and anthologies on literary theory.