Tragic Mode Research Articles

Remembering Chris Hani: Biography, agency, and political life today

This article is based on research carried out for the author’s PhD dissertation, which focused on the contested ways in which Martin Thembisile ‘Chris’ Hani is remembered and memorialised (in biographies, museums, exhibitions, film, and the public domain more generally), and what these invocations tell us about processes of historical production, the transitional period from apartheid to democracy, and what it means to live on in the wake of apartheid and colonialism. This article takes up some of these debates in an abridged form, focusing on processes of biographical production, the individual and experience, and what can be seen as a tension between romantic and tragic modes of narrative emplotment. Throughout Longford attempts to problematise individualist ideas about freedom, modernity, and agency, and offers alternative routes through which to understand historical change, political struggle, and subjectivity, as well as biographical and historical production as a conflicted and contested terrain.

History and Religious Imagination: Bernard Shaw and the Irish Literary Revival—an Overview

ABSTRACT An overview of Bernard Shaw’s involvement in early twentieth-century Irish history, both political and cultural. Pressure building since the death of Parnell in 1891 would lead to Ireland’s independence from Britain and the establishment of the Irish free State in 1922, with Shaw’s Irish friends Horace Plunkett, Augusta Gregory, George Russell (“Æ”), and especially W. B. Yeats all prime movers in major new national cultural institutions that sprang up around the turn of the century. Through these four as well as his Irish wife, Charlotte Shaw, Shaw became involved in both the affairs of the nation as well as in Irish drama, especially Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Yeats and his work were particularly important for Shaw’s contributions to the Irish literary revival, in which, whether in satirical, comic, or tragic modes, his Irish plays comprehend Irish mythology, history, imagination, and religious salvation.

Second Time as Tragedy: The Tragic Mode in Second Aliyah Hebrew Literature

Second Time as Tragedy: The Tragic Mode in Second Aliyah Hebrew Literature

What Was Tragedy during the Haitian Revolution?

AbstractContemporary actors and, later, historians and critics have long compared the Haitian Revolution to a tragic play. But the model of tragedy they invoke has changed over time. Today the best-known example comes from The Black Jacobins (1963), in which C. L. R. James narrates the events of the Revolution through the lens of a Hegelian definition of tragedy. David Scott has championed James’s “tragic mode of history” for political reasons, arguing that it is better suited to address the challenges of the postcolonial present. But a tragic mode of history can be of use for the postcolonial present only if it is firmly grounded in the world-changing events that it is supposed to illuminate. It should build on what tragedy was in the milieu of Toussaint Louverture and the slave rebels. To lay the groundwork for this critical shift, this essay traces how tragic performances and history intersected during the Revolution and shows how radicalized versions of Voltaire’s Roman-themed tragedies and Afro-Caribbean mythology and rituals played a prominent part in the fight for equality.

“The Pitiless Judgement of Time”: Human Extinction in the Evolutionary Tragedies of H.G. Wells

Since the first wave of Wellsian scholarship emerged in the 1960s, The Time Machine has been interpreted in light of H.G. Wells's various scientific obsessions, resulting in a wealth of interdisciplinary studies that have probed the relationship between the author's early fiction and Victorian science. Yet despite the critical consensus that the author's work incorporated insights culled from modern science in significant ways, scholars have not done enough to examine how Wells's wide-ranging early engagements with the sciences were often underwritten by a single conceptual concern: the speculative possibility of human extinction. Reading key fictional and non-fictional documents from the author's Victorian period, and culminating in an in-depth analysis that situates The Time Machine as a response to Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, this essay argues that scholars have not only failed to reckon with the centrality of human extinction to Wells's work and thought but have also tended to ignore the tragic dimensions that undergird his early writing, often despite explicit evidence that Wells viewed his fiction as contributing to the tragic mode. Working against this tendency, this essay argues that Wells offers a revised, post-Darwinian form of tragedy that directly confronts the existential precarity of the human species.

Latina Humor in the Works of Sandra Cisneros

Abstract: The paper discusses three works written by Sandra Cisneros, namely Woman Hollering Creek, The House on Mango Street and Caramelo, from the point of view of women’s humor. With the help of these works, it is argued that Cisneros uses Latina humor in order to highlight intersectional problems concerning her identity and to reveal important facts and features about/of Latino/a existence. The point is made that Cisneros uses comedy and humor to redeem the pain and suffering through laughter instead of utilizing the tragic mode of artistic expression, hence she is able to secure survival and solutions to problems instead of a tragic wallowing in negativity (which interpretive way could also have validity concerning the occurrences which are narrated). 
 Keywords: Latina humor, Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek, The House on Mango Street, Caramelo

AESTHETICS OF TRAGIC ICONOCLASM IN THE NIGERIAN NOVEL: EXAMPLES OF OKONKWO AND EZEULU

Tragic characters are the ones who remain with us long after we have encountered them in literature. Comedy might have its uses, but tragedy, with its grave actions which culminate in a catastrophic end for the central character, proposes by its very nature manifold representations of suffering and pain that catenate with our perceptions of the fallibility of humanity, a tragic narrative that substantiates human mortality. Albeit over the centuries the aesthetics of the tragic mode has received several modifications, from its origin in Greek drama to its crystalization in other literary manifestations, its core elements seem little affected. The purpose of this study is to examine the nature of tragedy in the Nigerian novel. Starting the evaluation from the scrutiny of what undergirds the tragic discourse,the basic procedure of this paper examines the aesthetics of tragedy in Nigerian fiction, using the central characters in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. The paper particularly analyses how the author treats the tropes of tragic "herohood" in the African context.One of the principal conclusions of this study is the discovery that the actions and inactions of the central figures are motivated by narcissistic orientations, and the crises in their tragic narratives are engendered by their attempts to mould societal history in a direction the community does not wish to go. In the ensuing crisis between the individual and the society, the individual invariably loses because "no man is greater than his community." The study discovers that though some aspects of the misfortune and anguish experienced by these tragic protagonists parallel those of classic Western literature, they introduce different contextual dynamics and characterological complexities to the architectonics of tragedy. The study concludes with the realisation that these dynamics and complexities have helped to create a new paradigm for tragedy in African literature.

Театр в поисках мифа: Антонен Арто и Мигель Анхель Астуриас

Two tendencies define one of the “master -currents” (Ch. Innes) in the XXth century drama, epitomized by Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty”: revival of ritual practices and search for a “new myth”. Artaud perceives the Myth both as the end and the means: by creating a new myth, theatre reveals and heals illnesses of modernity; by reviving the ancient, theatre conducts the primitive, metaphysical “forces” of the “great cultures”. Particularly attracted to the Mesoamerican world, Artaud intended to stage “The Conquest of Mexico” (1933), a drama in four acts, to inaugurate his new theatre. Considering this, a special relevance should be given to the fact that M.A. Asturias’s article –manifesto “Reflections on the Possibility of an American Theatre in Indian spirit” was published in November 1930, anticipating Artaud’s conception of theatre based on myth. The ideas stated in the manifesto will be put into practice in “Cuculcán” play, the last piece of the “Legends of Guatemala”, second edition (1948). Settled in Paris since 1924, Asturias received the same aesthetic impulses as Artaud did: surrealism, avant -garde cinematography, “Ballets russes”, primitivism in all its forms. However, their preferences were not thoroughly the same. A parallel reading of the manifesto and the chronicles reveals how Asturias’s ideas on theatre correspond to the cultural context. It can be affirmed that many of Asturias’s and Artaud’s principles are isomorphic: accentuation of colour and disproportion in decorations, abolition of stage, use of masks, formalized movements, rejection of rhetoric and declamation, revelation of word’s religious force. Yet the ways Asturias and Artaud work with myth differ: it is in a playful, not tragic and ritualistic mode that myths are being actualized in Asturias’s theatre, and not only by means of “mise en scène”. Asturias considers the Myth as an inherited language, that is why the action in “Cuculcán” is determined by speech and what he calls “the Word’s value”, in accordance with indigenous philosophy.

Grotesque Deconstruction of Oficial Colonial and Postcolonial Latin-American Identities From Valle-Inclan’s Tirano Banderas to Silviano Santiago’s Cosmopolitismo do pobre

This article explores the deconstructive function of grotesque elements in contemporary Spanish and Ibero-American Literature. Starting with Tirano Banderas. Novela de Tierra Caliente (1926), a highlight in Valle-Inclan’s esperpento aesthetics, mocking what authors as Bakhtin or Foucault pointed out as “official truths”, both collective and individual. It is argued that grotesque representation establishes a subversive relation when confronted with epic or tragic modes, as established by aristotelic-horatian and dogmatic poetics. This may shed some light on the relation between grotesque structure and critical deconstruction, from the so-called Baroque era up until modernist and postmodernist essay, such as it is the case of one of the most thoroughly sophisticated contemporary writers in Brasil, Silviano Santiago, whose collection of essays O Cosmopolitismo do Pobre (2004) is the third pillar of our analysis.

Grotesque Deconstruction of Oficial Colonial and Postcolonial Latin-American Identities From Valle-Inclan’s Tirano Banderas to Silviano Santiago’s Cosmopolitismo do pobre

This article explores the deconstructive function of grotesque elements in contemporary Spanish and Ibero-American Literature. Starting with Tirano Banderas. Novela de Tierra Caliente (1926), a highlight in Valle-Inclan’s esperpento aesthetics, mocking what authors as Bakhtin or Foucault pointed out as “official truths”, both collective and individual. It is argued that grotesque representation establishes a subversive relation when confronted with epic or tragic modes, as established by aristotelic-horatian and dogmatic poetics. This may shed some light on the relation between grotesque structure and critical deconstruction, from the so-called Baroque era up until modernist and postmodernist essay, such as it is the case of one of the most thoroughly sophisticated contemporary writers in Brasil, Silviano Santiago, whose collection of essays O Cosmopolitismo do Pobre (2004) is the third pillar of our analysis.

Politinis išsivadavimas ir „jautrusis subjektas“: lakaniško kairuoliškumo dilemos

The purpose of this paper is to tentatively explore the plausibility of the application of aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (and practice) to the purposes of Leftist political discourse. We live in an era when the forces of conservative political reaction are increasingly coming to the fore across Western democracies. In many Western states the reactionary right is in the ascendency: while the Left seems largely mired in political disarray and introspective impotence. Might the theories and insights of Jacques Lacan offer the Left some hope of a revivified intellectual and ideological cogency? This paper will attempt to draw together themes and ideas arising from recent scholarship within the field of Lacanian studies so as to explore ways in which the psychoanalytic theory and practice of Lacan might be utilised in the service of contemporary Leftist politics. In particular recent Lacanian scholarship has suggested that the provocative and fertile work of the scholar Slavoj Žižek might provide the foundation for just such a Lacanian Leftist renaissance. Contrary to this, this paper suggests that psychoanalysis itself should perhaps be regarded as a fundamentally tragic mode of thought – which might thus be intrinsically unsuited to the emancipatory purposes of the Left. Instead the paper will suggest that Lacanian theory might best serve the Left on a tactical level: as a radical interpretative technique whereby the texts and discourses of bourgeois cultural hegemony may be subjected to revivified critical scrutiny.

The Politics of Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September 11. By Christina Simko. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xii+290.

<i>The Politics of Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September 11</i>. By Christina Simko. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xii+290.

Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise by Nicolas Rasmussen

Reviewed by: Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise by Nicolas Rasmussen Lyle Fearnley (bio) Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise. By Nicolas Rasmussen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. viii+ 264. $35. The rise of biotechnology is a history told many times over, and told in both celebratory and dismissive, comic and tragic modes. Did biotech revolutionize the life sciences and create new tools for curing disease and producing value? Or was science essentially corrupted by its submission to venture capital and market forms of value assessment? In Gene Jockeys, Nicolas Rasmussen, like a handicapper, aims for an even race between the goods and evils of biotech. On the one hand, he argues that biotech firms offered an environment that was not radically opposed to the norms of the academy—“quasi-academic,” as he phrases it (p. 184). Above all, the biotech firms encouraged the publication of scientific papers: to keep scientist employees satisfied, to keep in touch with broader research fields, and above all, to further hype the reputation of the firm. Here Rasmussen gives too much weight to the rather unsurprising fact that scientists working in industry remained concerned with scientific credit, and he fails to identify the significant mutations of vocation and ethos that Paul Rabinow and others uncovered in the biotech milieu (Making PCR, 1996). On the other hand, Rasmussen suggests that despite the truly innovative work of scientists in the biotech sector, much of the value that they produced was—to cite one of his favored metaphors—“low-hanging fruit.” Decades of publicly funded university research during the cold war had left an archive of scientific knowledge that was quickly mined for patentable molecules. For Rasmussen, an “overgenerous” (p. 4) intellectual property regime enabled a few well-placed individuals to profit from the accumulated results of public research. This concept leads to Rasmussen’s most provocative claim, laid out in his conclusion. “We can never again expect the measure of business success so far recorded”: Any efforts to reproduce the remarkable, creative atmosphere of the first two decades when molecular biology met the business world—dependent as it was on the conjunction of ephemeral conditions in science, culture, law, and business—would be as futile as capturing a breaking wave in a bottle (p. 191). As I write from Singapore, where the government is furiously attempting to turn the tropical city-state into a biotech hub, the implications of this claim, if true, are extraordinary. Indeed, Singapore’s $500 million Biopolis could be a very costly incarnation of this bottle set out to catch the breakers. Mostly, however, Rasmussen’s Gene Jockeys eschews historical judgment for pace: thoroughbred pace. The titular metaphor aptly captures the tone and mood of the book’s narrative, which gallops from the 1920s [End Page 700] through to the 1990s in a breakneck 180 pages. Individuals, firms, events, methods, technologies appear and disappear as the story races by. As a result, despite Rasmussen’s occasional allusion to the concepts and approaches from anthropology or sociology of science, the work lacks the careful attention to the displacement of “epistemic things” (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger) that characterizes the best laboratory histories and ethnographies. Lyle Fearnley Lyle Fearnley is assistant professor of anthropology at Singapore University of Technology and Design. Copyright © 2016 Society for the History of Technology

Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition by Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill

110 BOOK REVIEWS “dark hued” (kyaneon). Foster draws our attention to the identification of the mythical Symplegades with the historical Cynaean Rocks and the nearby Chelidonian Islands (Hdt. 4.85.1), arguing that Theocritus uses this adjective not in error but rather as an intentional relocation of heroic trials from the traditional epic landscapetothebucoliclocusamoenus,aworldfromwhichHeraklesisultimately barred (129–135). Other highlights include sections on Theocritus’ destabilization of Pindar’s heroic Heracles in Chapter 4 (Nemean 1 and Idyll 24: The Poetics of Heroic Revisionism ), and the influence of Homeric hospitality scenes on the image of Arsinoe in Chapter 5 (Arsinoe as Epic Queen: Hosts, Hospitality, and Their “Reception ” in Idyll 15). I did note some editorial slips, such as the absence of some publication datesfrom thebibliography and otherminorerrata(e.g.page13 “thethe”; page 37 herdsmen who sings; page 79 primary narrator Idyll 11; p. 88 Khalkas; pages 19, 114, 138, 142, 143 Kholchis: cf. the correct spelling Kolchian on page 219). ANATOLE MORI University of Missouri, MoriA@missouri.edu * * * * * Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition. By JENNIFER L. FERRISS-HILL. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. x + 302. Hardcover, $95.00. ISBN 978-1-107-08154-3. Inspired by Horace’s claim that Lucilius “hangs entirely” from Old Comedy (Sat. 1.4.6) and Quintilian’s implicit pairing of Old Comedy and Roman satire in book 10 of the Institutio Oratoria, Ferriss-Hill argues that Roman satire “should be understood as an extended Old Comic parabasis” (44). To prove this thesis she explores the connections between Old Comedy and its Roman offspring as embodied in the work of Lucilius and Persius, and in all of Horace’s hexameter poetry— Satires/Sermones, Epistles, and Ars Poetica. Ferriss-Hill argues that Juvenal, who never explicitly connects himself to Old Comedy (19), turns instead to tragedy as a source of satiric inspiration (cf. Juv. 6.634-8) and thus rejects laughter (derived BOOK REVIEWS 111 elsewhere in satire from Old Comedy’s parabatic claims for “truth telling through laughter,” 17) in favor ofa serious tone when declaring his truths.Thus,she claims (although it is impossible to prove), any traces of the Greek genre in Juvenal likely derive from imitation of his Roman predecessors. Ferriss-Hill’s first and longest chapter (“The Poet in Tension”) discusses the tensions inherent in the artifex or poet’s self-representation in Old Comedy and Roman satire before Juvenal. The poet presents himself as simultaneously confidentand abject,“both wiseand flawed,essentialyetunappreciated”(45).Sections on the urban, didactic, misunderstood, physically or socially abject, lawbreaking, and chef-like aspects of the poetic persona draw on examples from Aristophanes and all four satirists, though Juvenal often proves the exception to the rules establishedbyhispredecessors .WhileFerriss-Hillfocusesonthetwogenres’continuity ofthemeandapproach,shealsodiscusseshowRomansatire’smoreparsimonious approachtofood(comparedtoOldComedy’scelebratoryfeasts)derivesfrom its smaller, elite, and private audience. Chapter2(“DefensivePoetics”)tracesthespreadofadefensivestancelinked to a stance of abjection—one pens a counterattack because one has been wrongly attackedbyothers—fromAristophanes(especiallyWasps)throughCallimachus’ Aetia preface and Terence’s prologues to Lucilius, Horace, and Persius. Juvenal, however, writing less (explicitly) programmatic and more agonistic satire than his predecessors (166,168),seems to compose satire in response to his surroundings rather than to any criticism of his work. Only Juvenal’s decision to adopt a tragic mode (6.634–638) provides any clue to potential attacks of his work. The third chapter (“Literary Criticism”) takes up Old Comedy and Roman satire’s unusual shared interest in literary criticism, both of their own genre as well as other genres. The perceived connection between the style and quality of a work and the “essence” of its author (Ferriss-Hill cites Seneca, Epistulae Morales 19.114: talis…oratio qualis vita) is the basis for such comic and satirical judgments (171). Ferriss-Hill proposes that the “frenetic intellectual” contexts in which the Old Comic poets and the four surviving Roman satirists worked provided the material for “these naturally omnivorous genres” to ingest and construct their poetry with (216). Here, as elsewhere, I would have liked to see more reflectionupontheRomansatiristswhoseworkdidnotsurviveduetoitsexclusionfrom the canon by Horace,Quintilian,and others.But Ferriss-Hillis following the precedent established by her satirical subjects: Horace both shapes the genre and converts Old Comedy’s synchronic...

Trauma and the Tragic in The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings

Abstract The article views O'Neill's two early plays, The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings, as dramatic expressions of traumatic experience. They dramatize posttraumatic memory that haunts the characters to the point of death and mental illness respectively. The plays are seen as tragic in a sense different from the traditional view of tragedy. They are defined as trauma-tragedies, the term recently introduced into the theory of drama under the influence of Ruth Leys and her explorations of trauma. This tragic mode brings the audience into the traumatic drama by providing it with the most intense physical sensation of trauma possible and in this way with a specific tragic catharsis.

Trauma and the Tragic in The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings

Abstract The article views O'Neill's two early plays, The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings, as dramatic expressions of traumatic experience. They dramatize posttraumatic memory that haunts the characters to the point of death and mental illness respectively. The plays are seen as tragic in a sense different from the traditional view of tragedy. They are defined as trauma-tragedies, the term recently introduced into the theory of drama under the influence of Ruth Leys and her explorations of trauma. This tragic mode brings the audience into the traumatic drama by providing it with the most intense physical sensation of trauma possible and in this way with a specific tragic catharsis.

Escape Artistry: Elisabeth Bergner and Jewish Disappearance in Der träumende Mund (Czinner, 1932)

The late Weimar film Der träumende Mund culminates in the apparent but unconfirmed suicide of its female protagonist, played by Elisabeth Bergner. Bergner, whose background contributed to the film’s Jewish reception, and who later claimed to have written the film’s screenplay, left Germany and went into exile with director Paul Czinner in 1932. This film and the circumstances of its production and premiere link tragic modes of self-erasure, including the suicides of both many women and many German Jews, to notions of escape, emigration, and reemergence. Its success among Jewish spectators points to its enduring and international appeal.

Modos ficcionais e historicidade: Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, Raymond Carver

O artigo propõe uma leitura comparativa das obras de Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Franz Kafka (1883-1924) e Raymond Carver (1938-1988), com base na “Teoria dos Modos” de Northrop Frye. Neste percurso, os diferentes usos do modo cômico e do modo trágico são analisados como signos de historicidade que acompanham transformações culturais verificadas entre os séculos XIX e XX no ocidente. Observa-se, então, que os contrapontos modais recorrentes em cada autor criam uma dinâmica de identidades e diferenças entre suas narrativas, bem como entre os textos e as circunstâncias contextuais em que emergem. E, por fim, é indicada uma possibilidade de mobilização desses recursos analíticos para o entendimento de aspectos da relação entre literatura e sociedade no período pós-1945, quando a proeminência do modo trágico confere relevância distintiva às manifestações pontuais do cômico na ficção.

Ambiguous Allegories: What the Mythological Comedia Reveals About Baroque Tragedy

I. The Double Bind Drawing on the ambiguous postclassical conception of classical myth, the serious Baroque mythological comedia, as practiced first of all by Lope de Vega and Calderon, (1) flaunts a paradoxical coexistence of what appear to be mutually exclusive mythographic perspectives. On the one hand, spectators and readers are presented with a series of horizontal readings of individual myths dominated by the empathetic and moving representation of subjective feeling and a realist depiction of characters' psychology. On the other hand, a fundamental detachment is perceived as the plays simultaneously launch a transcendental interpretation of myth that renders it yet another comic or insignificant event on the world's great stage: a folly, a fiction, a chimera of the human imagination, or even, theologically speaking, an error. The result of this intriguing double reading of classical myth is an extremely complex genre, which meditates on the cosmic convergence of the jocose and the serious--the insignificance or comedy of individual destiny in the greater scheme of things--even as genuinely tragic events may be represented on the stage. (2) The much noted scenographic lavishness, especially of that part of the mythological theater written for the court, only emphasizes this double bind even more. Here, conspicuously ostentatious sceneries paradoxically reinforce the engano of what is presented as a fabulous, imagined, and ultimately untrustworthy mythical world. Critics have brought to light a series of general characteristics of the serious mythological comedia: the tongue-in-cheek and even desacralizing treatment of the mythical universe on the part of the donaire (clown) reflecting the democratic propensity of Lope's early myth plays written after the smash hit formula of the dramatist's new comedia; (3) the Fenix's closely associated tendency toward anti-heroic or even negative characterization of the mythical hero and the gods; (4) Calderon's allegorization of the figures and stories of classical mythology as intricately entwined with Christian didactic poetics; (5) conversely, as the expression of a universal, transcultural psychosemiotics; (6) the eventual development of Calderon's serious mythological theater into mythological burlesque occasioned by the crisis of the Renaissance world; (7) the political, representational or propagandistic function of these plays; (8) conversely, their aestheticist tendency to dissolve all referentiality in sophistic reflexions on the nature of theatrical illusion (9)--to mention just a few fundamental studies of the genre. However, despite the fact that a considerable number of the mythological comedias by the dramatists in question (three out of eight plays by Lope; seven out of seventeen plays by Calderon) (10) qualify as tragic, in part or in full, existing studies fall short of accounting for the specific tragic mode that characterizes the mythological comedia, not to mention the special relation between this genre and tragedy. (11) Quite to the contrary, the mythological comedias have often been characterized as insignificant showpieces or dramatic bagatelles meant to divert a decadent royal audience interested in nothing but idle amorous intrigues and pretty words. Besides belittling the spiritual capability of some of Europe's most well-bred princes, taught by the best teachers and surrounded by the brightest intellectuals and most consummate artists, this recurrent interpretation severely derrogates a number of highly complex artworks. Thus, the significant characteristics of Baroque tragedy brought to the fore by these plays are generally overlooked, which is especially a pity since the status quaestionis of Baroque tragedy studies has not advanced decisively in recent decades despite increased scholarly attention. (12) Delving into the problem of Baroque tragedy from a new angle--that of its interrelation with myth--I will subsequently present a generic discussion of the serious mythological comedia. …

&lt;em&gt;The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Rosemarie Morgan

Reviewed by: The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy John P. Farrell (bio) The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Rosemarie Morgan; pp. xv + 603. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010, £75.00, $134.95. Thomas Hardy is getting up in the world. He is here the subject of a very handsomely produced book full of distinguished critical essays and very companionable scholarly resources. The editor, a distinguished Hardy scholar and critic herself, has created a work that in both conception and execution achieves what its title implies: a "comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current scholarship" in particular areas of Hardy studies (12). There will always be some unevenness in a collaborative enterprise such as this, but the standard of practical guidance and critical illumination is for the most part very high. This is a book of over six hundred pages, twenty-eight essays, and twenty-nine illustrations. (My favorite of the latter is J. A. Pasquier's vertigo-inducing picture of the cliff-walk in A Pair of Blue Eyes [1872-73]. No wonder Knight slipped.) The essays are grouped in eight categories, all of them reflective of recurring emphases in Hardy studies during recent decades. Not all the categories are sufficiently supplied. "Historical and Cultural Context," for example, seems underserved with three fairly specialized essays. Other sections pick up the slack, for example the rewarding discussions by Timothy Hands on Hardy's religious beliefs, Kevin Padian on "Evolution and Deep Time," and Andrew Radford on "Hardy and Scientific Humanism." Radford proposes that the Wessex novels can be read as narratives that assimilate and recreate "the 'proceedings' of the new sciences of humankind that evolved during the nineteenth century" (262). His point is well illustrated in Suzanne Keen's "Psychological Approaches to Thomas Hardy." Somewhat oddly—but perhaps wisely—the book foregoes an essay on the vexed question of Hardy's politics. It is also surprising that no single essay confronts Hardy's many experiments in narrative form, surely a hallmark of his novelistic career. Important aspects of his actual practice are discussed in superb essays by Richard Nemesvari on melodrama and by Dale Kramer on Hardy's incorporation and modification of tragic modes and themes in his novels. Nemesvari very astutely links Hardy's "version of the melodramatic mode" to his exploration of "modern states of uncertainty [and] constant flux" (83). Kramer, while perceptively reviewing a broad array of modern critical discourses on the nature of tragedy, stresses the extent to which the chameleon Hardy "is a master of the mixed genre" (384). The angle of pursuit in both of these essays (and in a number of others as well) leads to productive analyses of narrative form in Hardy's work. But the main road is not taken. Perhaps it should not be in a book whose aim is more to consolidate knowledge than to forge new trails. Nevertheless some very welcome widenings of familiar paths can be found in The Ashgate Research Companion. Rosemarie Morgan and Scott Rode in their essay on "The Evolution of Wessex" identify, with help from Heather Hawkins, Hardy's first recorded naming of Wessex in the subtitle of a poem written in 1866. This valuable essay casts a Bakhtinian eye on the roads and pathways that are usually woven into the fabric of Hardy's narratives. For good measure, it returns to Raymond Williams's characterization of Wessex as a border country situated between custom and enlightenment, labor and thought, rootedness and change. Suzanne J. Flynn surveys to good effect "the personal and cultural transitions that affected Hardy during the final years [End Page 364] of his prose-writing career and his early years as a published poet" (88). She identifies in this period a cluster of personal developments that both bore on Hardy's alienations and freed him to explore new literary territory. The essay gives some due prominence to Hardy's interest in Walter Pater. William A. Davis throws light on the legal issues that are often generated in Hardy's novels by marriage and sexual relations. He begins his essay "Hardy and the Law: Sexual Relations and 'Matrimonial Divergence'" by reminding readers that Hardy...