The Tragic Hero through Ages is an illuminating work on the greatest Greek and English tragedies and their heroes. The first chapter deals with the Greek tragedies and their heroes. The next three chapters study the outstanding pre-Shakespearean, Shakespearean and post-Shakespearean tragedies and their heroes. The Miltonic and the Byronic heroes have been studied in fifth and sixth chapters, respectively. The closing chapter summarizes the whole work and many undiscovered facts have been brought to light. It is genuine contribution to the whole theory of Greek and English tragic drama. It embodies the most famous speeches and best scenes from the greatest Greek and English Tragedies: their short summaries and the lifelike portraits of their heroes. It is a running commentary on the Greek and English tragic drama, spreading over a span of 2500 years with all its charm and grandeur. It is a colossal work with the finish of an exquisite piece of jewellery.

This volume explores the relationship of hero to celebrity and the changing role of the hero in American culture. It establishes that the nature of hero and its function in society is a communication phenomenon, which has been and is being altered by the rapid advance of electronic media.

This volume traces a path across the metamorphoses of tragedy and the tragic in Western cultures during the bourgeois age of nations, revolutions, and empires, roughly delimited by the French Revolution and the First World War. Its starting point is the recognition that tragedy did not die with Romanticism, as George Steiner famously argued over half a century ago, but rather mutated and dispersed, converging into a variety of unstable, productive forms both on the stage and off. In turn, the tragic as a concept and mode transformed itself under the pressure of multiple social, historical and political-ideological phenomena. This volume therefore deploys a narrative centred on hybridization extending across media, genres, demographics, faiths both religious and secular, and national boundaries. The essays also tell a story of how tragedy and the tragic offered multiple means of capturing the increasingly fragmented perception of reality and history that emerged in the 19th century. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

The period covered by this volume in the Cultural History of Tragedy set is bookended by two shockingly similar historical events: the beheading of a king, Charles I of England in 1649 and Louis XIV of France in 1793. The period between these two dates saw enormous political, social and economic changes that altered European society's cultural life. Tragedy, which had dominated the European stage at the beginning of this period, gradually saw itself replaced by new literary forms, culminating in the gradual decline of theatrical tragedy from the heights it had reached in the 1660s. The dominance of France's military and cultural prestige during this period is reflected in the important, almost exclusive, space dedicated in this volume to the French stage. This book covers the tragedies of France's two greatest playwrights - Pierre Corneille (1606-84) and Jean Racine (1639-99) - which would dominate not only the French stage but, through translations and adaptations, became the model of tragic theater across Europe, finding imitators in England (Dryden), Italy (Alfieri) and as far afield as Russia. This dominance continued well into the 18th century with the triumph of Voltaire's tragedies. This volume also examines how the writings of Diderot and Lessing changed the direction of theatre and how after the Revolution, in the writings of Goethe, Shiller, Hegel, tragedy and the tragic were reimagined and became the sign of European modernity. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

The effort in this book is to place before the readers certain aspects of the English literature produced by Michael Madhusudan Datta. Notwithstanding Michael being a major writer in Bengali literature, there are certain qualities in his English literature which merit some attention. This book attempts to highlight these qualities. There is a critical biography in which the English literature of Michael is given more attention. There is a consideration of his sonnets in English. The historical and the Romantic sensibilities have been discussed in some detail. The discussion of the historical sensibility is largely based on the works of Michael concerning certain events and periods in the history of medieval India and Europe. The Romantic sensibility of Michael is largely English but the setting and the themes are Indian. This book also contains a chapter on the influence of Michael’s Christian sensibility on the nature of his creativity.

With The Life of Reason in an Age of Terrorism, Charles Padrón and Kris Skowroński (editors) gather together a broad assortment of contributions that address the germaneness of George Santayana’s (1863-1952) social and political thought to the world of the early twenty-first century in general, and specifically to the phenomenon of terrorism. The essays treat a broad range of philosophical and historical concerns: the life of reason, the philosophy of the everyday, fanaticism, liberalism, barbarism, egoism, and relativism. The essays reflect a wide range of viewpoints and perspectives, but all coalesce around discussions of how Santayana’s thought fits in with and enhances an understanding of both our challenging times, and our uncertain future. Contributors are: Cayetano Estébanez, Matthew Caleb Flamm, Nóra Horváth, Jacquelyn Ann Kegley, Till Kinzel, Katarzyna Kremplewska, John Lachs, José Beltrán Llavador, Eduardo Mendieta, Daniel Moreno Moreno, Luka Nikolic, Charles Padrón, Giuseppe Patella, Daniel Pinkas, Herman Saatkamp, Jr., Matteo Santarelli, Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński and Andrés Tutor.

The first evaluation and critique of Hegel's theory of tragedy and comedy, this book also develops an original theory of both genres.

A reprint of the University of Toronto edition of 1965.

In this challenging new work, Nielsen compares Herodotus with Old Testament historiography as represented by the so-called Deuteronomistic History. He finds in the Old Testament evidence of a tragic form like that encountered in Herodotus's Histories. Nielsen begins by outlining Herodotus's Greek context with its roots in Ionic natural philosophy, the epic tradition and Attic tragedy, and goes on to analyse in some detail the outworking of the Herodotean tragedy. Against that background, the Deuteronomistic History is to be viewed as an ancient Near Eastern historiographic text in the tragic tradition.

In this volume, 8 lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the kaleidoscopically shifting dramatic forms, performance contexts, and social implications of tragedy throughout the period and across geographic, political, and social references. They attend not only to the familiar cultural lenses of English and mainstream Continental dramas but also to less familiar European exempla from Croatia and Hungary. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.