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Simple Pathetic Tragedy by Blair Hoxby is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Simple Pathetic Tragedy about?

The idealist philosophy of the tragic distinguishes between the truly tragic and the merely pathetic. The early modern poetics of tragedy, in contrast, elaborated Aristotle's description of Sophocles' Ajax as a simple pathetic tragedy. Trissino revived the species in his Sofonisba (1515), the rst regular tragedy of the Renaissance, and from there it descended through masterpieces of the tragic repertoire, including Racine's Bérénice (1670), Milton's Samson Agonistes (1671), and Gluck's Alceste (1767, 1776). The critical tide began to turn when Winckelmann stressed the reticence and moral resistance of Philoctetes and Laocoön. Soon all the major literary critics of the day (Schiller, Herder, Schlegel) were distinguishing the merely pathetic from the truly tragic, deeming pathos to be aesthetic only when it served as a portal to the noumenal realm. If renaissance humanists had not rediscovered Aristotle's description of the simple, pathetic tragedy, they might have been forced to invent it. Relying on a single, continuous action that proceeds to its catastrophe without surprises, this tragic species foregoes recognitions and unforeseen reversals of fortune in order to exercise the pa

Author

Blair Hoxby

Published

2015

Language

EN