Tragedy and the Modernist Novel

Manya Lempert is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona. She specializes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel, ancient and modern tragedy and philosophy, and theories of evolution.

1. Introduction: modernist tragedy; 1.1 Attic novelists; 1.2 Tragedy versus philosophy; 1.3 Tragic nature; 1.4 Modernism versus nihilism; 1.5 Tragic sociality and overview of chapters; 2. Hardy's theory of tragic character; 2.1 Neo-Greek modernism; 2.2 Hardy versus Plato and Aristotle; 2.3 Two Tesses; 2.4 Sue's reversals; 2.5 Scapegoating; 2.6 Nightmare skies; 3. Woolf and Darwin: tragic time scales and chances; 3.1 Immitigable trees; 3.2 Darwinian Tuchē; 3.3 Jane Ellen Harrison's ritual; 3.4 Gilbert Murray's tragedy; 3.5 Friedrich Nietzsche's love of fate; 3.6 Not 'Amor fati' but 'It is enough!'; 3.7 Woolf's tragic chances; 4. Camus's modernist forms and the ethics of tragedy; 4.1 Camus's idea of tragedy; 4.2 The moment in Camus and Woolf; 4.3 Camus versus Sartre; 4.4 Janine: a moment of being; 4.5 Jacques and Jessica: tragic affirmation; 4.6 The absurd Meursault; 4.7 The 'good modern nihilist' Clamence; 5. Beckett: against nihilism; 5.1 The unnamable: 'alleviations of flight from self'; 5.2 Losing species: from Mahood to worm; 5.3 Beckett's Oedipus and Lispector's mystic; 5.4 Nihilism and recoil from nihilism; 5.5 Beckett's ancient philosophy; 5.6 No counter-tragic calm; 5.7 Company: 'That was I. That was I then.'; 5.8 Palliative moments; Bibliography; Index.