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.

'This is an extraordinarily erudite book about literary modernism and the relationship between it and the history and theory of tragedy. Lempert's overall discussion of Greek tragedy is absolutely riveting and her close-reading of form is extraordinarily sensitive. Lempert has produced an extraordinarily bold argument that is likely to attract a great deal of attention not only from modernist scholars but from others further afield.' Ato Quayson, Stanford University, California