Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory ed. Marcus Nevitt And Tanya Pollard (review)

In his recent Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann observes that "a definition of tragedy has been pursued more zealously throughout the ages than just about any other non-religious matter" (23). If that is indeed the case, then it makes Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard's Reader in Tragedy all the more vital a collection. Collapsing the untold numbers of pages written on the subject to just over three hundred, spread across a generous selection of fifty-one texts, Nevitt and Pollard have crafted a thoughtful entry point to the trans-historical zealotry that Lehmann describes.

The primary audience for such a volume will of course be undergraduates, though the selection of essays is both broad enough in its historical scope and thoughtful enough in its occasional eccentricities to be useful to graduate students new to the field as well. Even scholars curious about the oft-ignored discourse on tragedy of the eighteenth century might find much to learn from in Nevitt and Pollard's nine selections from that period. With its student readership in mind, the collection foregoes a long trans-historical introduction (its general introduction runs to only five pages) for more robust, period-specific introductions covering "Antiquity and the Middle Ages," "The Early Modern Period," "The Eighteenth Century," "The Nineteenth Century," "1900 to 1968," and "Post-1968." Each individual entry also receives a brief expository opening, though these are only a paragraph. The entries end with three or four suggestions for further reading drawn primarily from more recent journal articles and book chapters, and the anthology concludes with an ample list of "Supplementary Reading." The entries are rigorously footnoted throughout.

At its best, the Reader offers some of the most fundamental works on tragedy from antiquity to the present, supplemented by important but overlooked pieces and insightful introductory remarks. Alongside lengthy excerpts from Aristotle's Poetics, Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, or the work of Martha Nussbaum, for instance, one can find selections from Evanthius's De Fabula, read George Eliot on Sophocles, or encounter Judith Butler on Antigone. The entire eighteenth-century section, though somewhat anglocentric, is a gift to those who work outside the period and may not realize its contributions to the theorization of tragedy before the nineteenth-century tidal wave of German idealism; here, newspaper impresarios such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele sit easily alongside philosophers and playwrights such as David Hume and Joanna Baillie. Meanwhile, Nevitt and Pollard's readable introductions ruminate thoughtfully on the preponderance of the three core families of Attic tragedy – the houses of Cadmus, Atreus, and Priam – in the literatures of the ancient world or begin to tease out the place of tragedy in post-structuralist thought.

Inevitably, there are choices with which some readers might quibble. The selections from the Middle Ages, for instance, are actually drawn from texts of late antiquity that proved influential in the Middle Ages, leaving a millennium-long gap between 400 CE and 1555 CE that could have been filled by figures like Lovato Lovati, who wrote on Seneca in the thirteenth century. A bit later on, the innovativeness of the volume's eighteenth-century selections is somewhat dimmed by the section's omitting important German thinkers; it leaves out entirely Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller, while the section on the nineteenth century leaves out a number of that era's most vital contributors, among them Friedrich Hölderlin, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Schelling. (In fairness, however, the breadth of nineteenth-century writings on tragedy could make for a volume in itself, and Nevitt and Pollard speak to these particular omissions in their introductory material.) In the two twentieth-century sections, one might wish to see works by Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, or Wole Soyinka, although the inclusion of pieces by Athol Fugard...