Tragic Drama and Modern Society (Edinburgh Studies in Sociology) Book

This study examines the relationship between tragic drama of the late 19th and 20th centuries and present-day society. The author's theories are presented with excerpts from relevant plays, such as "Look Back in Anger", "The Glass Menagerie", "The Iceman Cometh" and "Hedda Gabler". In this expanded edition, Orr criticizes anti-mimetic responses to the Real and discusses passion and community as the central structure of feeling in tragic realism, tracing their origins in Stendhal, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and explaining their contemporary eclipse in the West. Tragic realism is seen not as a function of the "political unconscious" but as the literary form of the passionate political. John Orr is author of "Tragic Realism and Modern Society - The Passionate Political in the Modern Novel" and "The Making of the Twentieth Century Novel - Joyce, Lawrence, Faulkner and Beyond".Read More