Table of Contents

List of Figures

1 Tragic Events and the Idea of Tragedy

2 Lamenting 9/11

3 The Dogs of War

4 Shooting Conflict

5 The Year of Revolutions

6 Claiming Asylum

7 Hamartia in the Anthropocene

Coda: Figuring Tragedy

Notes
Acknowledgements
Index

Promotional Information

A cultural analysis of the first two decades of the 21st century, reading tragic events from 9/11, the Arab Spring, drone warfare and the threat of climate change with the critical attention usually devoted to tragic drama and philosophy.

About the Author

Jennifer Wallace is Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, UK, and editor of A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2019). Her previous books include Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination (2004) and The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (2007).

Reviews

This rich analysis is valuable not only because it underlines the importance of a broader cultural horizon, showing the topicality of more or less “ancient” literary and philosophical resources, but also because it celebrates different evaluations of current events and historical consciousness in a remarkably original approach.
*Modern Drama*

Tragedy since 9/11 is a demanding, provocative read—well researched, articulate, and persuasive. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
*CHOICE*

Powerful, deeply felt, thoughtful and convincing.
*Times Higher Education*

[A] remarkable book … [that] draws attention to the relationship between the horrors of the first two decades of the twenty-first century and the wider human conditions of tragedy and suffering.
*Studies in Theatre and Performance*

A bold and ambitious book ... It is the astonishing range of material [Wallace] draws from our more immediate past and present that makes her book so rich and suggestive ... One ends Wallace’s impassioned book with a deepened sense of the historical crisis through which we are living.
*Modern Language Review*

Jennifer Wallace’s gripping book explores how the tragic tradition can still engage us today. In a learned yet passionate study, Wallace overturns tired commonplaces about canonical tragedies and makes these plays compelling models for framing the horrors of the past two decades.
*Rebecca W. Bushnell, University of Pennsylvania, Emerita Professor of English*

This book is unique in its conception of the ancient trope of the tragic as the best guide to the crisis of the 21st century. Concerned with tragedy as both a literary and a political mode, Wallace brilliantly explains how it helps us negotiate the most pressing problems of modern society, from terrorism and environmental catastrophe, to the suffering of refugees on the shifting sands of our time.
*Simon Gikandi, Princeton University, USA*