Leo Aylen was born in South Africa in 1935. He was a classical scholar at New College, Oxford. In 1962 he was awarded a PhD for research in the drama department of Bristol University. Dr Leo Aylen has appeared on about a hundred campuses in the United States and Canada, as the guest of Classics, English, Drama and Theatre, Film and Communication, Departments. He is that rarity, a scholar who is also a performer and director in both film and theatre.

• Preface Introduction Part I: Greek Tragedy 1. The Background to Greek Tragedy 2. Aeschylus 3. Sophocles 4. Euripides 5. The Common Ground of Tragedy Part II: The Possibility of Modern Tragedy 6. Tragedy and Philosophy 7. Poetry and the Theatre Part III: Modern Tragic Writing 8. Introductory 9. The Nineteenth-century Background 10. Miller 11. Cocteau, Gide, Giraudoux 12. Anouilh 13. Sartre 14. Ghéon 15. Eliot 16. Conclusion Notes Appendix Bibliography Critical Bibliography Index

Review of the Original Publication: “An important book that towers high above the pedestrian level of most of what nowadays goes by the name of ‘critical literature’ on drama.”- Martin Esslin, The ListenerThe Author of this very interesting book opens his introduction with a declaration of serious intentions. “The one thing that is certain about a human being is that he will die. Any first-year student of linguistic philosophy could tear this declaration to shreds, but it is a part of Mr Aylen’s thesis that linguistic analysis has already accomplished its necessary task — the chief of which was to make quite certain that Idealism is so dead that it will never rise again — and that what is now needed, in philosophy, in the arts, in ethics, and religion, is a new “imaginative synthesis.”- Philip Toynbee, The Observer