Studying three tragic authors to explore the meanings—and consequences—of modernity
 
The emergence of a distinctly modern form of tragedy is often associated with the introduction of middle-class characters and settings to high drama during the early eighteenth century. What has not been explored previously, however, is how such tragedy uses modernity’s social circumstances to stage metaphysical conditions that are destructive to human worlds. Leonardo F. Lisi pursues this argument by focusing on three central yet distinct figures in the history of modern thought and theater: eighteenth-century English dramatist George Lillo, early nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, and late nineteenth-century Norwegian iconoclast Henrik Ibsen. Modern Tragedy and the End of Worlds: Lillo, Leopardi, Ibsen shows that their works share a critical theme: the impossibility of sustaining human forms of meaning in the face of modern materialism, finance, and reason. Viewed in this light, Lisi argues that modern tragedy requires thinking together the incommensurable scales of human existence and the inhuman processes on which it rests—a task that continues to have profound relevance for imagining the end of worlds in the Anthropocene.

LEONARDO F. LISI is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce.

Introduction: Cosmos and Tragedy
Chapter 1: Tragic Modernity in Lillo’s London Merchant
Chapter 2: Leopardi’s Critique of Bourgeois Reason
Chapter 3: The Matter of History in Ibsen’s Master Builder
Conclusion: Meaning Without World 
Acknowledgments 
Notes 
Bibliography