The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Walter Benjamin; John Osbourne; George Steiner

ISBN 10: 1859844138 / ISBN 13: 9781859844137

Published by Verso, 2003

Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G1859844138I5N00

Synopsis:

Walter Benjamin is widely acknowledged as amongst the greatest literary critics of this century, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama is his most sustained and original work. Indeed, Georg Lukacs-one of the most trenchant opponents of Benjamin's aesthetics-singled out this work as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.
The Origin of German Tragic Drama begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of the royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer, and the theatre of Shakespeare and Calderon. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history.
The characteristic atmosphere of the Trauerspiel was consequently 'melancholy'. The emblems of baroque allegory point to the extinct values of a classical world that they can never attain or repeat. Their suggestive power, however, remains to haunt subsequent cultures, down to this century.

About the Authors: Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

George Steiner, author of dozens of books (The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, Heidegger, In Bluebeard's Castle, My Unwritten Books, George Steiner at the New Yorker), is Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University.

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Publisher: Verso
Publication Date: 2003
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Fair
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket