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
Biography
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.
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 Listener
The 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
