Page 8 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes Fiction is, in general, any narrative about invented characters and events, whether in verse or prose.
The narrower meaning of the term, however, refers to works written in prose. The major genres of
fiction are the novel, the short story, and the novella.
Drama differs from poetry and fiction in that it is usually intended for performance. The form may
be divided into the broad categories of comedy and tragedy. A third and smaller category,
tragicomedy, combines features of each of those major genres.
Genre is an important word in the English class. We teach different genres of literature such as
poetry, short stories, myths, plays, non-fiction, novels, mysteries, and so on. When we speak about
a kind of literature we are really speaking about a genre of literature. So when someone asks you
what genre of literature you like, you might answer, poetry, novels, comics, and so on. On the other
hand literary terms are words used in, and having specific meaning in discussion, review, criticism
and classification of genres. Words that are used frequently for the purposes described above are
recognized as literary terms. For example, personification, simile, hyperbole, metaphor, tragedy,
and tragic hero are used to describe various forms of writing by an author. Here in this unit we will
explain the terms tragedy and tragic hero. More emphasis will be given on the classical and Aristotle’s
concept of tragedy and tragic hero.

Example: The word “personification” is a word or a literary term. The definition of
personification is an object, thing, or nonhuman character having human traits. Writers/Authors
may use examples of personification in their writings. An example of personification used may be
“The wind howled through the trees.” The wind is the nonhuman and the howling is something
that a human may do. Thus, the wind has a human characteristic or is an example of personification.

1.1 Classical and Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy

Tragedy (Ancient Greek: tragoidia, “the-goat-song”) is a form of art based on human suffering that
offers its audience pleasure. Though throughout the world most cultures have developed forms
that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played
a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. That tradition
has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect
of cultural identity and historical continuity—”the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural
form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity.” From its obscure origins in the theatres of
Athens 2,500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles
and Euripides, through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine,
and Schiller, to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Strindberg, Beckett’s modernist meditations
on death, loss and suffering, and Müller’s postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy
has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change. A
long line of philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Camus, Lacan, and Deleuze have analysed,
speculated upon, and criticised the tragic form. In the wake of Aristotle’s Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy
has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general (where the tragic
divides against epic and lyric) or at the scale of the drama (where tragedy is opposed to comedy). In
the modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama, the tragicomic, and epic
theatre.

In the theatre, a play dealing with a serious theme, traditionally one in which a character meets
disaster as a result either of personal failings or circumstances beyond his or her control. Historically
the classical view of tragedy, as expressed by the Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles,
and the Roman tragedian Seneca, has been predominant in the Western tradition.

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