Shop Today's Labor Day deals
Currently Unavailable
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Walter Benjamin
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Radical Thinkers) Paperback – June 9, 2009

by Walter Benjamin (Author), John Osborne (Translator), George Steiner (Contributor)
Cited by Lukács as a principal source of literary modernism, Walter Benjamin’s study of the baroque stage-form called Trauerspiel (literally, “mourning play”) is the most complete document of his prismatic literary and philosophical practice. Engaging with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German playwrights as well as the plays of Shakespeare and Calderón and the engravings of Dürer, Benjamin attempts to show how the historically charged forms of the Trauerspiel broke free of tragedy’s mythological timelessness. From its philosophical prologue, which offers a rare account of Benjamin’s early aesthetics, to its mind-wrenching meditation on allegory, The Origin of German Tragic Drama sparkles with early insights and the seeds of Benjamin’s later thought.
Read more
Previous slide of product details
  1. Print length
    256 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Verso Books
  4. Publication date
    June 9, 2009
  5. Dimensions
    5.12 x 0.64 x 7.75 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1844673480
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1844673483
Next slide of product details
The%20Amazon%20Book%20Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of [the twentieth] century.”—Sunday Times

“He drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe.”—Susan Sontag

About the Author

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

George Steiner, author of dozens of books (The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, Heidegger, In Bluebeard’s Castle, My Unwritten Books, George Steiner at the New Yorker), is Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University.

Product details

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Walter Bendix Schonflies Benjamin (1892 -- 1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.