Overview

From the trauma of September 11th, through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the aftermath of the Arab Spring and the environmental warning signs of climate change, this book reflects on the crises and terrifying events of the early 21st century and argues that a knowledge of tragedy from the works of Sophocles to Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett can help us understand them. Jennifer Wallace offers a cultural analysis of the tragic events of the past two decades with reference to a litany of key dramatic texts, including Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Euripides’ Hecuba, Iphigenia in Aulis, Trojan Women and Bacchae, Homer’s Iliad, Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean and Enemy of the People, and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Macbeth and King Lear, among others.

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9781350035614

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Reviews

This is book is unique in its conception of the ancient trope of tragic as the best guide to the crisis of the twenty first century. Concerned as much with tragedy as a literary and political mode, Wallace brilliantly explains how it helps us negotiate the most pressing problems of modern society, from terrorism, environmental catastrophe, to the suffering of refugees on the shifting sands of our time. -- Simon Gikandi, Princeton University, USA

Jennifer Wallace's gripping book explores how the tragic tradition can still engage us today. In a learned yet passionate study, Wallace overturns tired commonplaces about canonical tragedies and makes these plays compelling models for framing the horrors of the past two decades. -- Rebecca W. Bushnell, University of Pennsylvania, Emerita Professor of English

Author Information

Jennifer Wallace is Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, UK, and editor of A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2019). Her previous books include Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination (2004) and The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (2007).

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