Book News: Modernists and Greek Tragedy

Tragedy and the Modernist Novel

BY MANYA LEMPERT
Cambridge University Press, September 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 9781108496025
https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/tragedy-and-modernist-novel?format=HB

This study of tragic fiction in European modernism brings together novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a Darwinian vision of nature. To their minds, both tragedy and natural history disclosed unwarranted suffering at the center of life. Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett broke with entrenched philosophical and scientific traditions that sought to exclude chance, undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary biology. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel uncovers a temporality central to tragic novels' structure and ethics: that of the moment. These authors made novelistic plot the delivery system for lethal natural and historical forces, and then countered such plot with moments of protest - characters' fleeting dissent against unjustifiable harms.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do not constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

• Explains how modern novelists thought about ancient and modern tragedy
• Unveils the similarities between Greek tragedy and Darwinian evolution
• Explores modernist authors' depictions of nihilism, suicide, and political violence and apathy as cautionary tales for readers today, showing how fiction can endorse and condemn different ethical and political positions

‘This is an extraordinarily erudite book about literary modernism and the relationship between it and the history and theory of tragedy. Lempert's overall discussion of Greek tragedy is absolutely riveting and her close-reading of form is extraordinarily sensitive. Lempert has produced an extraordinarily bold argument that is likely to attract a great deal of attention not only from modernist scholars but from others further afield.' 

--Ato Quayson, Stanford University, California

‘The themes of this book could hardly be more resonant and enduringly relevant to modernist literary studies. This book pits tragedy and modern writing against nihilism – a way of renouncing or not caring about existence – finding a way for moments of light to counter total eclipse of meaning without callow resolution or pat consolation.' 

--Ronan McDonald, University of Melbourne

 

Manya Lempert is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona. She specializes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel, ancient and modern tragedy and philosophy, and theories of evolution.