Tragedy and the Modernist Novel (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781108496025)

This study of tragic fiction in European modernism brings together novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a Darwinian vision of nature. To their minds, both tragedy and natural history disclosed unwarranted suffering at the center of life. Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett broke with entrenched philosophical and scientific traditions that sought to exclude chance, undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary biology. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel uncovers a temporality central to tragic novels' structure and ethics: that of the moment. These authors made novelistic plot the delivery system for lethal natural and historical forces, and then countered such plot with moments of protest - characters' fleeting dissent against unjustifiable harms.

Author: Manya Lempert
ISBN-10: 1108496024
ISBN-13: 9781108496025
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 09/10/2020
Pages: 290
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.19lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2021