Brecht and Tragedy

Martin Revermann is Professor in Classics and Theatre Studies at the University of Toronto. His publications include Comic Business: Theatricality, Dramatic Technique and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy (2006), Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin (2008, with P. Wilson), Beyond the Fifth Century: Interactions with Greek Tragedy from the Fourth Century BCE to the Middle Ages (2010, with I. Gildenhard), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy (2014), A Cultural History of Theatre, vol. 1 (Antiquity) (2017) and Semiotics in Action (2019).

• Introduction: Radicalism, traditionalism, eristics; Part I. Point of contact 1948: 1. 1948 – A year of krisis; 2. Professing non-Aristotelianism: Brecht's Small Organon for the Theatre (1948); 3. Utilizing Greek tragedy: Brecht's The Antigone of Sophocles (1948); 4. The making of a model: Antigonemodell 1948; Part II. Positionings: 5. The other Other: Brecht's Asia; 6. Naturalism and related diseases; 7. Schiller: rival and inspiration; 8. Comedy and the comic; 9. Shakespeare and the road beyond tragedy; Part III. Comparatist explorations: 10. The tragedy of Mother Courage; 11. Brechtian chorality; 12. Threepenny Opera: the view from below; 13. Appellative anti-tragedy: gods, parody and closure in The Good Person of Sezuan; 14. Mahagonny: rise and fall of a dystopian city; 15. Anti-tragic justice: The Measure; 16. Heroism and its discontents I: the epic tragedy The Judith of Shimoda – expansion, commentary, metapoetics; 17. Heroism and its discontents II: Galileo, a tragic hero of science?; Conclusion: Brecht and tragedy – pulling threads together.

'This is a book that should have been written long ago but it is really only someone like Revermann, with equal grasp of Greek tragedy, tragedy as a diachronic form (rather than a mode), and a deep knowledge of the history of modern European performance traditions, who could write it.' Fiona Macintosh, Director of The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), University of Oxford