Tragedy: A Short Introduction reinvigorates the genre for readers who are eager to embrace it, but who often find the traditional masterpieces too distant from their own language and world.

• Argues that today's most popular television shows and films thrive on the type of violence, passion, madness, and catastrophe first introduced to the stage in fifth century Athens
• Offers selected case studies that exemplify the compelling qualities of tragedy
• Reviews the history of tragic performance and the qualities of the classic tragic hero, and clarifies the role of plot in defining traged
• Analyzes the difference between a tragedy, a catastrophe, and a mere unhappy ending
• Explores the past and future of the tragic form

Rebecca Bushnell is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She edited A Companion to Tragedy and authored Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance, and Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles’ Theban Plays.