Jennifer Wallace is Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, UK, and editor of A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2019). Her previous books include Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination (2004) and The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (2007).
Powerful, deeply felt, thoughtful and convincing. * Times Higher Education * Jennifer Wallace's gripping book explores how the tragic tradition can still engage us today. In a learned yet passionate study, Wallace overturns tired commonplaces about canonical tragedies and makes these plays compelling models for framing the horrors of the past two decades. -- Rebecca W. Bushnell, University of Pennsylvania, Emerita Professor of English This book is unique in its conception of the ancient trope of the tragic as the best guide to the crisis of the 21st century. Concerned with tragedy as both a literary and a political mode, Wallace brilliantly explains how it helps us negotiate the most pressing problems of modern society, from terrorism and environmental catastrophe, to the suffering of refugees on the shifting sands of our time. -- Simon Gikandi, Princeton University, USA