The Art of Tragedy and the Battle Against It

A new interpretation of tragedy - from our tragic poets' perspective - The Art of Tragedy & the Battle Against It explains how a tragedy works as art. It disagrees with how our literary critics have always explained a tragedy morally. It explains how a tragedy produces its dramatic and tragic impact from a violation of an audience's expectation, from a principle of dramatic incongruity. It disagrees with how our literary critics have always explained a tragedy instead as a natural result of a tragic hero's flawed activity, which satisfies an audience's expectation. It cites the dramatic situations of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Goethe, and Arthur Miller, in their tragic plays, contradicting the literary theories of Aristotle, Hegel and A C Bradley, in particular. It has full chapters on "The Tragic Flaw Concept," "The Natural Order of Things," "The Object of the Drama," "Tragic Pleasure," "Irony," "Catharsis," and "The Sublime." Timothy Sharkey (ALM, Harvard University) spent ten years researching, writing, and developing the arguments for The Art of Tragedy & the Battle Against It. He presents his arguments now, as an aesthetic interpretation of tragedy, in a way that completely contradicts and completely rejects our traditional, moral interpretation of tragedy, and its cornerstone, the tragic flaw concept.