Читать книгу Tragedy - Ashley Horace Thorndike - Страница 7

Table of Contents

The student of the theory of tragedy may extend his reading through most books dealing at all with the theatre or drama, works of literary history and criticism, treatments of æsthetics in psychology and philosophy, as well as the tragedies themselves. Only the briefest direction for such reading can be given here. Among recent works closely connected with the matter of the chapter, are: W. L. Courtney, The Idea of Tragedy in Ancient and Modern Drama (1900); Lewis Campbell, Tragic Drama in Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare (1904); Ferdinand Brunetière, L'évolution littéraire de la tragédie (1903) (in vol. 7 of Etudes critiques); and Melodrame ou Tragédie (Variétés Littéraires 1904); Elizabeth Woodbridge, The Drama, its Law and its Technique (1898), with bibliography. Several recent books on Shakespeare are concerned with dramatic theory: A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1905); T. R. Lounsbury, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1901); G. P. Baker, The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907). A book now out of date and never sound, but of wide influence still, is Freytag's Technik des Dramas (1881), translated as The Technique of the Drama, Chicago (3d ed. 1900). For a study of literary criticism in reference to dramatic theory, Saintsbury's History of Criticism, 3 vols. (1900–04), furnishes a compendious directory and discussion. An Introduction to the Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism, by C. M. Gayley and F. N. Scott (1899), furnishes full bibliographical references with comment and direction. Of great value in their special fields are Butcher's edition of Aristotle's Poetics (3d ed. 1902); W. Cloetta's Beitrãge zur Litteraturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, Halle (1890), vol. i; and J. E. Spingarn's Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (1899). English critical discussions of tragedy will be noted in the chapters on the various historical periods. For tragedy in relation to æsthetic theory, full references are given in Gayley and Scott; and Volkelt's Æsthetik des Tragischen, Munich (2d ed. 1906), supplies a valuable and comprehensive discussion and a directory and criticism of nearly all æsthetic theories since Kant. Especial mention should be made of A. W. Schlegel's Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (1817), translated into English in the Bohn edition; and to Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Æsthetik, which closes with a discussion of dramatic poetry that has been suggestive of much later theorizing.