Tragedy: A Student Handbook (EMC Advanced Literature Series) - Softcover

Sean McEvoy; Tony Coult; Chris Sandford

Softcover

ISBN 10: 190610106X ISBN 13: 9781906101060

Publisher: English & Media Centre, 2009

Synopsis

Tragedy: A Student Handbook is a comprehensive introduction to tragedy, designed for advanced level and undergraduate students. It provides clear explanations of key concepts in tragedy and changing ideas about tragedy over time, from classical theories and Renaissance thinking through to modern interpretations. There are short introductions to broad periods and contexts - Greek tragedy, Renaissance tragedy, European playwrights of the late 19th century, modern American tragedy, modern British tragedy and modern Irish tragedy - as well as accounts of the work of significant playwrights, including Sophocles, Shakespeare, Webster, Marlowe, Ibsen, Beckett, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Brian Friel. Key plays are explored in more detail. These include: Oedipus, all Shakespeare's major tragedies, The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil, A Doll's House, Waiting for Godot, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Death of A Salesman, All My Sons, , A View from the Bridge, Playboy of the Western World, Shadow of a Gunman and Translations.The text includes short extracts from criticism, a glossary of terms and questions to provoke reflection on the way individual plays use the tragic form.

About this title

About the Author

The text is written by Dr Sean McEvoy (whose other books include Shakespeare the Basics and Hamlet: A Sourcebook) , with additional material by Tony Coult (About Friel) and Chris Sandford. All three authors are regular writers for emagazine

From the Back Cover

Tragedy: A Student Handbook is a comprehensive introduction to tragedy, designed for advanced level and undergraduate students. It provides clear explanations of key concepts in tragedy and changing ideas about tragedy over time, from classical theories and renaissance thinking through to modern interpretations.

Along with short introductions to broad periods and contexts - Greek tragedy, Renaissance tragedy, European playwrights of the late 19th century, modern American tragedy, modern British tragedy and modern Irish tragedy - there are accounts of the work of significant playwrights, including Sophocles, Shakespeare, Webster, Marlowe, Ibsen, Beckett, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Brian Friel, and a close focus on key plays.

The text includes short extracts from criticism, a glossary of terms and questions to provoke reflection on the way individual plays use the tragic form.

From the Inside Flap

Introduction
This book is an introduction to tragedy for students at advanced or undergraduate level. It provides an overview of key concepts and developments in tragedy, major dramatists in the genre of tragedy and their most significant plays. Critical perspectives on the genre, on individual writers and plays, are incorporated into the text, offering a sense of some of the major strands of thinking about tragedy over time.

Although the book is broadly chronological, some chapters giving an overview of a playwright or period (for example, Modern British tragedy and Arthur Miller) deal with plays in a different sequence considering the treatment of the tragic genre more holistically.

References within the text
The date given to both play extracts and critical quotations refers to the date of writing or first publication. The page reference is to the edition from which the quotation has been taken. Where there may be confusion, the reference gives both the original date of writing and the date of the edition from which the extract has been taken. For full details of the critical texts quoted from, including the edition used, see the bibliography on pages 248.

Editions of play texts used for quotations included in Tragedy: A Student Handbook are listed on pages 9-10.

Dates for Shakespeare's plays are taken from Andrew Gurr's The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642.

Terms and concepts emboldened in the text are glossed on pages 236 to 239.

Bold page numbers are used to cross reference to other sections of this publication.

The index
Page references in bold indicate a substantial discussion of the play, playwright or concept. Page numbers in italics refer to the glossary.

Edition details

• Publisher: English & Media Centre
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 190610106X
• ISBN 13: 9781906101060
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Barbara Bleiman, Lucy Webster