The Art of Tragedy & the Battle Against It explains the masterpieces of Western literature – our tragic dramas – in aesthetic terms. It disagrees with how our literary critics have explained our tragic dramas in moral terms throughout history. It illustrates the way that Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Arthur Miller, for example, created the dramatic and tragic impact in their plays with dramatic incongruity, a principle that works aesthetically. It disagrees with how our literary critics – Aristotle, Hegel, and A C Bradley, in particular – have removed this principle of dramatic incongruity and have replaced it instead with a logic of moral propriety. They have connected a tragic hero’s catastrophe to the thing that he did wrong to cause it with his tragic flaw. As a result, they have precluded the possibility of incongruity existing in a catastrophe. The Art of Tragedy & the Battle Against It, accordingly, explains how Prometheus Bound, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo & Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, Faust, and Death of A Salesman produce their dramatic and tragic impact with dramatic incongruity. There is a conflict between our tragic poets who wrote their tragic plays aesthetically and our literary critics who have explained them morally. The Art of Tragedy & the Battle Against It cites our tragic poets’ ideas about incongruity from the dialog of their actual tragic plays. It contains full chapters on “The Natural Order of Things,” “The Tragic Flaw Concept,” “The Object of the Drama,” “Tragic Pleasure,” “Irony,” “Catharsis,” and “The Sublime,” among others.
Timothy Sharkey (ALM, Harvard University) spent several years researching, writing, and developing the arguments for The Art of Tragedy & the Battle Against It. He presents his best arguments now in a completely new and completely worked-out aesthetic theory of tragedy. It is fully researched with over 70 sources and 200 footnotes.
Please Note: the paperback version of The Art of Tragedy & the Battle Against It features professional typography designed in the tradition of the Fine Press movement in England and America – especially the book designs of Bruce Rogers – and it uses Bruce Rogers’ own Centaur typeface.
A new interpretation of tragedy – from our tragic poets’ perspective – The Art of Tragedy & the Battle Against It explains how a tragedy works as art. It disagrees with how our literary critics have always explained a tragedy morally. It explains how a tragedy produces its dramatic and tragic impact from a violation of an audience’s expectation, from a principle of dramatic incongruity. It disagrees with how our literary critics have always explained a tragedy instead as a natural result of a tragic hero’s flawed activity, which satisfies an audience’s expectation. It cites the dramatic situations of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Goethe, and Arthur Miller, in their tragic plays, contradicting the literary theories of Aristotle, Hegel and A C Bradley, in particular. It has full chapters on “The Tragic Flaw Concept,” “The Natural Order of Things,” “The Object of the Drama,” “Tragic Pleasure,” “Irony,” “Catharsis,” and “The Sublime.” Timothy Sharkey (ALM, Harvard University) spent ten years researching, writing, and developing the arguments for The Art of Tragedy & the Battle Against It. He presents his arguments now, as an aesthetic interpretation of tragedy, in a way that completely contradicts and completely rejects our traditional, moral interpretation of tragedy, and its cornerstone, the tragic flaw concept.
