Genres & Forms
Tragedy
Tragedy is a dramatic genre based on an irreconcilable, insoluble conflict of an outstanding personality with circumstances, society, or fate, usually ending in the hero's destruction; it evokes deep shock in the spectator and, according to Aristotle, catharsis — a purification through pity and fear. The genre was born in ancient Athens (Aeschylus; Sophocles's Oedipus Rex and Antigone; Euripides) and reached new heights in the work of William Shakespeare (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth) and the French Classicists Corneille and Racine. In Ukrainian literature the genre of tragedy is approached by the dramatic poems of Lesia Ukrainka (Cassandra, The Orgy), by historical drama, and by the tragic principle in the plays of Mykola Kulish (Pathetic Sonata), where the hero's personal fate is inseparable from national catastrophe.
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Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Two poles of the dramatic kind, opposite in pathos and outcome. Tragedy shows the insoluble conflict of an exceptional personality with fate, society or their own nature, ending in the hero's suffering or death and the spectator's catharsis. Comedy ridicules flaws, incongruities and the absurdities of life, tends toward a happy, reconciling resolution and provokes laughter, not dread. Tragedy elevates and purifies through suffering; comedy exposes and corrects through laughter.
