Tragedy as a Travelling Form : Itineraries from Thespis to Today

Abstract

Covering a broad historical spectrum from Greek Antiquity to the 21st century, this open access book asks how tragedy's formal features have impacted its travels, and how these travels have shaped its forms. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars of classics, English, German and French literature, postcolonial literature, musicology and theatre and performance studies, it provides a multifaceted overview of form processes related to travelling. It presents tragedy as a dynamic figuration that emerges, stabilizes and transforms through relocation and adaptation. The collection begins with the tragedies of Antiquity and then investigates the 17th and 18th centuries, from Shakespeare to Voltaire, as a laboratory for the formal transformation of tragedy, inextricably linked to the social and political changes of that time. The volume concludes with travelling tragedies in the 20th and 21st centuries. This section focuses on two former colonies on the African continent (Nigeria and South Africa) as an exemplary field for exploring form travel in the postcolonial, globalized present, in which tragic forms have become transcultural and are circulating so fast that they can no longer be easily related to concepts of locality, nation or continent. Arguing that the strategies that made tragedy portable also expanded its formal potential, this book also discusses the migration of tragedy as a process of form itself. While adaptation studies frequently focuses on the political dimensions of transcultural modifications of tragic plots, this book suggests that formal concerns are also political and social matters.