A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Early Modern Age

About the Author Naomi Conn Liebler is Professor of English at Montclair State University, USA. She is the author of Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Politics of Reading (2007), The Female Tragic Hero in Renaissance English Drama (2002) and Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (1995). She also co-edited Tragedy: A Critical Reader, with John Drakakis (1998).Rebecca Bushnell is School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers Professor Emerita of English at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Her books include Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles' Theban Plays (1988); Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (1990); A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (1996); Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (2003); A Companion to Tragedy ( 2005); and Tragedy: A Short Introduction (2007). She is Immediate Past President of the Shakespeare Association of America, Product Description In this volume, 8 lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the kaleidoscopically shifting dramatic forms, performance contexts, and social implications of tragedy throughout the period and across geographic, political, and social references. They attend not only to the familiar cultural lenses of English and mainstream Continental dramas but also to less familiar European exempla from Croatia and Hungary.Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.