Tragedy and the Return of the Dead makes a valuable contribution to recent reassessments of the tragic tradition. John D. Lyons's capaciously comparative study brings together a diversity of theories and fictions across periods and media. In doing so, it also charts the shift from a premodern view to contemporary perceptions of tragedy, in particular a dissociation of the tragic from events and feelings.

Lyons begins Tragedy and the Return of the Dead in the late eighteenth century, when an idealist view assumed a tight hold on popular and academic understandings of tragedy and the tragic. According to this view, tragedy is rare and defined by abstract and conflicting forces. By contrast, in the ancient and early modern worlds, a “nominalist (or concrete) view of tragedy and the tragic” prevailed (4). Lyons's introduction draws on the writings of Aristotle, Corneille, and others to flesh out a premodern view of tragedy as pervasive, violent, and profoundly affective. Resuming this critical history in chapter 4, Lyons traces the shift from idealist to nominalist views of tragedy through ideas of the sublime. In what is arguably the book's most valuable chapter, Lyons unpacks Edmund Burke's aesthetics of fear as the juncture, if also the turning point, between a classical and neoclassical poetic tradition of tragedy, in which fictional representations of worldly suffering elicit intense emotions, and Romantic and modern philosophies of the tragic as intellectual, elite, discursive, and transcendent.

The dominance of idealism led to widespread reports of the death of tragedy. Yet these reports prove to have been greatly exaggerated, for nominalist tragedy persists in other modes. In three chapters—“Home and Hearth,” “Burial and the Care of the Dead,” and “Specters”—Lyons presents the characteristic ways that a concrete view of tragedy manifests in premodern tragic plays and tragiques histoires and remains “a current of drama, narrative, and film that runs without pause into the twenty-first century” (5). At its core, according to Lyons, nominalist tragedy is about domestic violence. Murder and other fearful acts upend relations between parents and children, hosts and guests, friends and allies, even humanity and divinity. Such disruptions to natural and social structures usually take place in homely settings, occasioning Lyons's meditations on tragedy and Freudian theory. Failures to redress initial transgressions, as corpses lie above ground or the living are buried, lead to victims coming back and demanding redress. The return of the dead or its spectral double repeats the return home that often sets tragic events in motion, thus perpetuating the cycle of violation. Lyons illustrates these elements through close readings of an impressive range of tragic fictions, from ancient Greek and seventeenth-century French dramas to gothic novels and modernist films. If “we know that tragedy traces a circle and that we can join the circle at any point” (111), Tragedy and the Return of the Dead rewards the reader who engages this portion of the book in its entirety more so than the reader who pops in for an isolated chapter or close reading.

Lyons acknowledges in the preface that his area of expertise is seventeenth-century French tragedy, and the book also demonstrates a mastery of classical tragedy. Analyses of early modern English tragedy are less strong, due in part to factual errors (for instance, in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Bel-Imperia does not marry either, let alone both, of her non-aristocratic lovers) and the omission of key texts (such as Thomas Heywood's An Apology for Actors, which describes the purported effects of dramatizations of familial violence, and domestic tragedies like Arden of Faversham that exemplify a nominalist view). Reading Lyons's analyses of nineteenth-century novels and twentieth-century films, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Chris Marker's La Jet é e, is like listening to a series of virtuoso lectures. At times, however, it feels as if premodern tragedy's features may be found anywhere, which risks undermining nominalism as a useful heuristic. Tragedy and the Return of the Dead will thus prove most beneficial to students and scholars of early modern French and comparative literatures, if also compelling reading for anyone interested in tragedy's longue dur é e.