The Modernity of Western Tragedy: Genealogy of a Developing Anachronism

Abstract

Since the shift from modernist, formalist, and old historicist methodologies of mid-twentieth-century criticism, tragedy has been a problematic term. In the earlier age of the American New Critics and their British analog F. R. Leavis, it was one of the classic instances of a “timeless” literary category that embodied the “news that stays news” that Ezra Pound thought epitomized the literary. Tragedy was an example par excellence of a genre tied to a permanent human condition—death. As such, however, it was also largely taken for granted in the practice of the New Critics, American and British—one of the large-scale literary categories that could be safely ignored in favor of the strategies of close reading and detecting complex ironies. At times the whole project of defining a larger genre was simply ruled out of order. Kenneth Muir spoke for many in this critical generation when he wrote, “There is no such thing as Shakespearean tragedy. There are only Shakespearean tragedies” (12).