The 'rise of the middle class' in the eighteenth century has long been taken to usher in a prosaic age synonymous with the death of tragedy, an age in which the sheer ordinariness of bourgeois life was both antithetical and inured to the tragic. But the period's literature tells a very different story. Re-assembling a body of print and performance concerned with the misfortunes of the middling sort, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy argues that these works imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, an 'ordinary suffering' proper to ordinary life, divested of the sorts of meanings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it. Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the admirable, this 'bourgeois and domestic tragedy' treated the pain of common people with dignity and seriousness, meditating upon a suffering that was homely, familiar, entangled in the nascent values of capitalism, yet no less haunted by God. Hence, where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, misfiring emotion, and the absence of an idealized tragicness in the genre, this volume sees instead a sustained engagement in the emotional processes and representational techniques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. By attending closely to this long neglected subject, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy turns the critical account of eighteenth-century tragedy on its head. It reads the genre's emergence in the period as a vigorous cultural conversation on whose life--and whose way of life--is grievable, as well as how mourning might be performed

A study of eighteenth-century dramatic and narrative tragedies that explores the relation between personal misfortune and the emerging values that would define the everyday experience of the middle class. The volume discusses the work of George Lillo, Samuel Richardson, Aaron Hill, and Sarah Fielding, among others.

The middling sort was often thought to be immune or ill-suited to tragedy, its modest, commercial way of life ensuring, in the words of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), that those in the middle station went "silently and smoothly thro' the World." This project assembles an archive of eighteenth-century text and performance that contradicts this optimism. In contrast to the familiar critical narrative of tragedy's demise or stagnation in the eighteenth century, Modernity and Affliction argues that a body of work depicting the afflictions of the middling sort was vital to a series of cultural debates concerned with imagining modes of ordinary suffering and collective grief. Whereas heroic and neoclassical tragedy had rarified and idealized the afflicted subject, bourgeois tragedies probed the relation between existential misfortune and the emerging values that would define the everyday experience of the middle rank in Britain--among them domesticity, privacy, capitalism, and Protestantism. Far from triumphalist or complacent in its ideology, the very emergence of the genre suggests that the Crusoevian "rise of the middle class" was met with ambivalence, haunted by the possibility of that newfound value's loss and anxious about suffering's lurid portrayal in various experimental forms of early realism. The dissertation ranges across a body of works that includes George Lillo's pioneering domestic dramas, The London Merchant (1731) and Fatal Curiosity (1736), Samuel Richardson's landmark novel, Clarissa (1748), Edward Moore's prose tragedy, The Gamester (1753), Sarah Fielding's sentimental novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Laurence Sterne's ironic exploration of bourgeois mourning in A Sentimental Journey (1768), and several others largely absent from our critical histories, redefining bourgeois tragedy in order to better account for its energetic movement between page and stage, as well as the changing aesthetic conventions that governed the archive's production and reception in the period. Modernity and Affliction thus ultimately historicizes modes of bourgeois affect through which suffering was embodied, represented, and consumed in the period, tracing a process whereby the narrowly defined poetics of tragedy gave way to a broader, melancholic sense of the tragic as a condition of all modern life.

The 'rise of the middle class' in the eighteenth century has long been taken to usher in a prosaic age synonymous with the death of tragedy, an age in which the sheer ordinariness of bourgeois life was both antithetical and inured to the tragic. But the period's literature tells a very different story. Re-assembling a body of print and performance concerned with the misfortunes of the middling sort, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy argues that these works imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, an 'ordinary suffering' proper to ordinary life, divested of the sorts of meanings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it. Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the admirable, this 'bourgeois and domestic tragedy' treated the pain of common people with dignity and seriousness, meditating upon a suffering that was homely, familiar, entangled in the nascent values of capitalism, yet no less haunted by God. Hence, where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, misfiring emotion, and the absence of an idealized tragicness in the genre, this volume sees instead a sustained engagement in the emotional processes and representational techniques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. By attending closely to this long neglected subject, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy turns the critical account of eighteenth-century tragedy on its head. It reads the genre's emergence in the period as a vigorous cultural conversation on whose life—and whose way of life—is grievable, as well as how mourning might be performed

What is English bourgeois tragedy? What forces produced it, and what is its significance in the first great period of English drama? It is the purpose of this dissertation to answer these questions by a detailed study of bourgeois tragedy as it existed in England between 1576 and 1642, the dates of the building of the first London play-house and of the closing of the theaters by the puritans. This investigation includes the following points: a historical study of the influence of social, political, and religious conditions upon bourgeois tragedy in its rise, its flourishing, and its decline; an analysis of the basic conceptions which differentiate bourgeois tragedy from the main body of contemporary tragedy, constituting it a special and significant type; a study of its relations, through secondary and stylistic qualities, to antecedent English drama, to the contemporary English drama, and to other literary types.

This account of artisan and working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, adds an important dimension to our understanding of the nineteenth century. E.P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and re-creates the whole life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation and who yet created a culture and political consciousness of great vitality.