The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy narrates a watershed moment in the history of suffering. In a time when tragedy was reserved for the elevated depiction of noble and heroic affliction, a series of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘domestic’ tragedies radically departed from these constraints in order to explore the misfortunes of ordinary people with a newfound dignity and seriousness. Eighteenth-century authors reimagined the possibilities of tragic form as an exploration of ‘ordinary suffering’, that is, a common, domestic, and familiar distress, entangled in the nascent values of capitalism yet no less haunted by God. Rebuffing the view that this era marks the ‘death of tragedy’, as well as the easy optimism associated with ‘the rise of the middle class’, this volume reads the genre as a vigorous cultural conversation on who was grieved and how mourning was performed.