Product Description

What do we mean by 'tragedy' in present-day usage? When we turn on the news, does a report of the latest atrocity have any connection with the masterpieces of Sophocles, Shakespeare and Racine? What has tragedy been made to mean by dramatists, story-tellers, critics, philosophers, politicians and journalists over the last two and a half millennia? Why do we still read, re-write, and stage these old plays? This book argues for the continuities between 'then' and 'now'. Addressing questions about belief, blame, mourning, revenge, pain, witnessing, timing and ending, Adrian Poole demonstrates the age-old significance of our attempts to make sense of terrible suffering.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #149742 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

About the Author
Adrian Poole is Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has written and lectured on Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, on literary translation and on nineteenth-century English literature. His publications include Gissing in Context (1975), Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example (1987), Shakespeare and the Victorians (2003), The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation (1995,
co-edited with Jeremy Maule), and editions of novels by Dickens, James and R. L. Stevenson. He is working on a project about witnessing tragedy developed out of his 1999 British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, 'Macbeth and the Third Person'.

Customer Reviews

Not the most illuminating book
I bought this book because I am studying Shakespearean Tragedy and wanted to get a handle on the bigger picture. Adrian Poole seems very knowledgeable about his subject, but I think that this format doesn't do his work justice, which is frustrating for me at least.

I get the impression that this book is a compression of a much larger work. This suffers because in my opinion it is rather bitty and unformed. The chapters are a little woolly and don't really seem to have much structure to them in terms of narrative. I was really frustrated because what he writes is comprehensible and indeed sensible, but it is very fragmented. There are lots of lists, lots of allusions, lots of inferences, but not much meat on the bones. What I wanted was for Poole to set the agenda and then take me on a journey from A to B. To be fair to the man he did set the agenda, but it remained fragmented and incoherent for much of the time.

I ended the book with a lot of vague ideas about tragedy, but not much more to say about it than when I set off. I understand that these books are introductions to whet the appetite for further study. I have read many of these OUP series and found them extremely helpful on numerous occasions, leading me to further study in a coherent and structured way. This didn't work that way and I felt that I would have been better served just reading whatever work this was compressed from. It was a real shame.