A01=Leonardo F. Lisi
Adorno
aesthetic education
aesthetics
Alexander Baumgarten
Anthropocene
Antonio Negri
apocalypse
Auerbach
Author_Leonardo F. Lisi
bourgeois culture
bourgeois tragedy
capitalism
capitalism and drama
capitalism and theater
Category=ATD
Category=ATY
Category=DSBD
Category=DSBF
Category=DSG
Category=DSM
climate change
climate collapse
climate crisis
comparative drama
comparative literature
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Fichte
finance capitalism
George Lillo
Giacomo Leopardi
Habermas
Hans Blumenberg
Heidegger
Henrik Ibsen
Horkheimer
Leibniz
Lukacs
materialism
Max Weber
modern theater
modern tragedy
modernism
modernity
neo-Kantianism
Nietzsche
ontology of drama
philosophy and drama
philosophy and literature
posthumanism
Schopenhauer
scientific revolution
sentimentalism
symbolism
the concept of world
The London Merchant
The Master Builder
theater
Thomas Hobbes
Tragedy
Welt
Weltanschauung
Weltliteratur
worldbreaking
worldmaking
Zibaldone
Product details
- ISBN 9780810149120
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Feb 2026
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 us to think together about 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.
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 us to think together about 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.
