Abstract

The Need to Risk Tragedy

The article discusses books and authors. "Shakespeare and the Natural Condition," by Geoffrey Bush, "The Modern Temper," by Joseph Wood Crutch, "The Spirit of Tragedy," by Herbert J. Muller, "Tragedy: A View of Life," by Henry Alonzo Myers and "The Outsider," by Colin Wilson. These books are typical of those now being written on the theme of tragedy. Together, they well represent the huge reorientation of literary energies that is currently taking place, a dear and necessary shift from concern with craft, with technique, with the artist's plight, indeed a shift from the whole New Critical preoccupation with literature as a specialized, metasocial, verbal activity, most interesting where it, can be showed to be, least accessible to the judgments and standards employed in "life."