Tragedy in Transition.

Blackwell Publishing, Malden / Oxford / Carlton, 2007. XII,315p. ills.(B&W photographs). Hard bound with dust wrps. Nice copy. 'This collection of essays is bold and unashamedly far-reaching in its approach to the subject of tragedy, a topic that has enjoyed a high status in the history of literary criticism and aesthetics. (...) Although the discourses on the death of tragedy have shadowed most thinking about tragedy from the end of the Greek model to Georg Steiner's twentieth-century aphorisms, the impressive essays in this volume testify to the genre's enduring persistence and ability to address notions of loss and mourning, death and resurrection, history and transition. Indeed, the term transition, as it appears in the title, proves central for the understanding of tragedy as a genre whose form and content are particularly sensitive to notions of the boundary (individual/collective, past/present, history/ metaphysics, life/death) and exhibit a level of adaptability that adds an intertextual quality, which throughout time has become constitutive of the form. S.A. Brown in her illuminating introduction calls this quality tragedy's 'capacity to be adapted and transformed' (p.1). And it is this quality that the authors pick up on as they draw a number of dazzling connections between texts and periods. (...) The collection is framed by two insightful essays, one by each Editor. The Introduction by S.A. Brown helpfully sets out the methodological parameters of the project, where the interdisciplinary dimension (...) gives way to the trans-historical (which indeed may be a trope to which humanities can have a particular claim). (...) The Afterword by C. Silverstone does not simply summarise the concerns of the volume; it also points towards future areas of research: the interface between tragedy and trauma, tragedy and mourning; readership and spectatorship; the possibility or impossibility of tragedy after Auschwitz; the centrality of the tragic mode in contemporary philosophical reflection (...). These two chapters hold together an impressive range of essays by an equally impressive line-up of contemporary scholars, mainly from the filed of English Literature and Classics.' (OLGA TAXIDOU in The Classical Review (New Series), 2009, pp.354-55).