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Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames

The Future in the Instant

  • Book
  • © 2016

Overview

Authors:
  1. Rebecca Bushnell

    1. Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

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  • Takes an innovative approach to the study of tragedy, questioning commonly held assumptions about the genre
  • Considers how tragedy has impacted the presentation of temporality on screen
  • Looks at a range of forms and eras, from Greek tragedies to videogames and new media

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Table of contents (4 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvii
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  2. Time, Choice, and Consequences in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy

    • Rebecca Bushnell
    Pages 1-22

  3. Tragic Adaptation and Performance: Undoing the Play

    • Rebecca Bushnell
    Pages 23-45

  4. Time-Travel Films: Replaying Time, Choice, and Action

    • Rebecca Bushnell
    Pages 47-64

  5. Tragic Time and Choice in Videogames

    • Rebecca Bushnell
    Pages 65-86

  6. Back Matter

    Pages 87-108
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Keywords

About this book

This book explores how classical and Shakespearean tragedy has shaped the temporality of crisis on the stage and in time-travel films and videogames. In turn, it uncovers how performance and new media can challenge common assumptions about tragic causality and fate. Traditional tragedies may present us with a present when a calamity is staged, a decisive moment in which everything changes. However, modern performance, adaptation and new media can question the premises of that kind of present crisis and its fatality. By offering replays or alternative endings, experimental theatre, adaptation, time travel films and videogames reinvent the tragic experience of irreversible present time. This book offers the reader a fresh understanding of tragic character and agency through these new media’s exposure of the genre’s deep structure.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

    Rebecca Bushnell

About the author

Rebecca Bushnell is the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She has written books on many different subjects, including prophecy in Homer and Sophocles, Renaissance tyrant plays, early modern humanist pedagogy, early English gardening books, and the genre of tragedy.

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