Reviewed by:

• Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe's Age of Reason ed. by Blair Hoxby
• Daniel Gustafson (bio)

The fate of eighteenth-century tragedy in the long sweep of Western theatre history is most often to get swept under the rug. Sandwiched between the early modern heights of Shakespeare or Racine and the twentieth century's revived interest in the tragic after Ibsen and Nietzsche, marked by philosophical optimism and the rise of the novel, the eighteenth century as a period is witness to "the decline of tragedy as a viable theatrical genre" (2). Such is a persistent narrative of theatre history that editor Blair Hoxby describes in the opening pages of Shadows of the Enlightenment and that the volume on the whole convincingly dispels. The eleven essays collected here unearth the assorted ways in which dramatic tragedy remained essential to European intellectual life between the late seventeenth century and Romanticism. Wide-ranging in locale and language (the featured scholars work in and sometimes across the English, Dutch, French, and German national traditions), discipline, and method, the essays render the long eighteenth century as a complex and exciting moment in the genre's history for the way it operated, as Hoxby argues, as "a period of transition in which dominant, residual, and emergent ideas of – and practical experiments in – tragedy coexist" (8). One of the book's strengths is how fruitfully it substantiates this claim, as it documents a lively cultural moment in which the inheritance of tragic models from classical antiquity sits side-by-side, both productively and uneasily, with fresh designs for the genre. The book's second strength lies in its account of how dramatic tragedy addresses issues on the vanguard of current eighteenth-century studies, particularly affect theory, form and history, and the role of theatre as a public institution.

After clarifying the stakes of the volume's intervention in his introduction "Tragedy at the Crossroads of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment," Hoxby opts to proceed via a discussion of illuminating examples rather than pursue a more pointed line of argument. He outlines the neoclassical theories of the French l'abbe Batteux as a launching point to explore the diversity of Enlightenment thought on tragedy in a pan-European setting: from discussions of Aristotelianism and tragic pleasure to different contemporaries' takes on the form, history, and public function of the genre. On the one hand, the preference for multiplicity of example over more sustained critical synthesis of the field has its drawbacks. Perhaps the most notable of these is that Hoxby has a real command of the material (as evidenced in his own 2015 monograph What Was Tragedy?, which possessed a similarly impressive scope), but his authoritative voice is not always evident in this format. On the other hand, what emerges in the [End Page 418] introduction is an intriguing series of motifs that connect Enlightenment ideas of tragedy to classical and modern ones, depicting tragedy as the grounds in the period for a productive "collision between antiquity and modernity" (25). To take an example: if the 1960s debate between George Steiner and Raymond Williams on tragedy as universal or as historically contingent remains a flashpoint for studies of tragic theory still today, then Hoxby's readings uncover how eighteenth-century writers were already working through the same crux. The critical lineage of these two camps—with full awareness of inevitable slipperiness between them, Hoxby denotes them "Enlightened" and "Counter-Enlightened"—becomes one of the more fascinating throughlines of the volume (9-10).

Shadows of the Enlightenment is judiciously divided into three sections with three distinctly thematic (rather than national) focal points. To resist the urge to group the essays by nation or by chronology is a nice touch, and the thematic categories do much to advance the volume's comparativist impulses. Part I, "Ancient Forms, Modern Affects," assembles four essays on Enlightenment theories of the passions, but takes readers from the early eighteenth-century she-tragedies of Nicholas Rowe through discussions of reason, enthusiasm, religion, and...

审核人：

• 启蒙运动的阴影：欧洲理性时代的悲剧。通过布莱尔霍克斯比
• 丹尼尔·古斯塔夫森（生平）

在漫长的西方戏剧史上，18 世纪悲剧的命运往往被掩盖。夹在莎士比亚或拉辛的早期现代高峰与二十世纪对易卜生和尼采之后悲剧的复兴兴趣之间，以哲学乐观主义和小说的兴起为标志，十八世纪作为一个时期见证了“作为悲剧的衰落”一个可行的戏剧流派”（2）。编辑布莱尔·霍克斯比 (Blair Hoxby) 在《启蒙的影子》( Shadows of the Enlightenment)的开头几页中描述了戏剧历史的这种持久叙事并且整个音量令人信服地消除了。这里收集的 11 篇文章揭示了戏剧性悲剧在 17 世纪晚期和浪漫主义之间仍然对欧洲知识分子生活至关重要的各种方式。这些文章在地域和语言（特色学者研究英国、荷兰、法国和德国民族传统，有时跨越英国、荷兰、法国和德国民族传统）、纪律和方法方面范围广泛，将漫长的 18 世纪描绘成该流派的一个复杂而激动人心的时刻正如霍克斯比所说，它的运作方式的历史是“一个过渡时期，其中主导的、残余的和新兴的悲剧思想——以及悲剧的实践实验并存”(8)。这本书的优势之一是它如何卓有成效地证实了这一主张，因为它记录了一个生动的文化时刻，在这个时刻，古典时代的悲剧模型的继承与该流派的新设计并存，既富有成效又令人不安。这本书的第二个优势在于它描述了戏剧悲剧如何解决当前 18 世纪研究的前沿问题，特别是影响理论、形式和历史，以及戏剧作为公共机构的作用。

在澄清了该卷在他的介绍“启蒙与反启蒙十字路口的悲剧”中的干预利害关系之后，霍克斯比选择通过对有启发性的例子的讨论来继续，而不是追求更尖锐的论点。他概述了法国 l'abbe Batteux 的新古典主义理论，作为探索泛欧背景下启蒙运动思想多样性的起点：从对亚里士多德主义和悲剧快感的讨论到不同同时代人对形式、历史、和流派的公共职能。一方面，比起对该领域更持久的批判性综合来说，对示例多样性的偏好有其缺点。什么是悲剧？，具有同样令人印象深刻的范围），但他的权威声音在这种格式中并不总是很明显。另一方面，[End Page 418]中出现了什么简介是一系列有趣的主题，将悲剧的启蒙思想与古典和现代悲剧思想联系起来，将悲剧描绘为这一时期富有成效的“古代与现代之间的碰撞” (25) 的基础。举个例子：如果说 1960 年代乔治·斯坦纳和雷蒙德·威廉姆斯关于悲剧是普遍存在的还是历史上偶然发生的争论至今仍是悲剧理论研究的导火索，那么霍克斯比的解读揭示了 18 世纪的作家们是如何克服同样的症结的. 这两个阵营的批判血统——充分意识到他们之间不可避免的微妙关系，霍克斯比将他们称为“开明的”和“反开明的”——成为该卷 (9-10) 中更引人入胜的主线之一。

启蒙运动的影子被明智地分为三个部分，具有三个明显的主题（而不是国家）焦点。抵制按国家或按时间顺序对论文进行分组的冲动是一种很好的做法，主题类别在很大程度上促进了该卷的比较主义冲动。第一部分“古老的形式，现代的影响”汇集了四篇关于激情的启蒙理论的文章，​​但通过对理性、热情、宗教和……