Twentieth century critics have definite ideas about tragedy. They maintain that in a true tragedy, fate must feel the resistance of the tragic hero's moral freedom before finally crushing him, thus generating our ambivalent sense of terrible waste coupled with spiritual consolation. Yet far from being a timeless truth, this account of tragedy only emerged in the wake of the French Revolution.

What Was Tragedy? demonstrates that this account of the tragic, which has been hegemonic from the early nineteenth century to the present despite all the twists and turns of critical fashion...