Do the Greek tragic plays represent universal themes, forms, and experiences that transcend the veils of antiquity, language, and time? Or are their particular, historically specific meanings to the ancient Greeks irrelevant to a modern, secular, society? Miriam Leonard's valuable and timely Tragic Modernities addresses this familiar impasse in an innovative way by analyzing how modern ideas of tragic universality (and particularity) first emerged within the texts of the German idealist philosophers who analyzed tragedy, particularly Hegel, and from there shaped the work of later political theorists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts, including such figures as Marx, Arendt, Freud, Benjamin, Schmidt, Heidegger, Lacan, and Butler. By tracing out a complex interplay between ancient plays and their modern readers, Leonard shows that not only the idea of the tragic, but also the actual plays themselves, were formative for modern philosophical and political thought.
The book joins a recent wave of reconsiderations of tragedy...
