EGH103: Hybrid Forms – Comedy and Tragedy

Module Reading

Primary Material

Plautus, Menaechmi 

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 

Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors and Romeo and Juliet 

Noel Coward, Private Lives 

Michaela Coel, I May Destroy You

Angela Carter, Wise Children ** 

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things ** 

Theoretical Material

Aristotle, The Poetics

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World

Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’

Martha Nussbaum, ‘The Morality of Pity’

** = texts for purchase (any edition will suffice for these two novels). The rest of your

reading will be available freely/digitally via the module Blackboard site. The two

novels by Carter and Roy are substantial (and fabulous); we recommend that you

plan well ahead with your reading for these weeks in particular.

All secondary reading will be made available via the module reading list on

Blackboard. Should you wish to start thinking about genre earlier than semester 2,

however, the following are books are all extremely useful places to start (and can be

located via Starplus, the online library catalogue):

Bevis, Matthew, Comedy: A Very Short Introduction

Bushnell, Rebecca, (ed.), A Companion to Tragedy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)

Dubrow, Heather, Genre (London: Methuen, 1982)

Danson, Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres (Oxford: OUP, 2000)

Nevitt, Marcus, and Pollard, Tanya, (eds.), Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of

Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory (London and New York: Bloomsbury,

2019)

Orgel, Stephen, ‘Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama’, Critical Inquiry (1979), 107-

23

Poole, Adrian, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2005)

Snyder, Susan, ‘The Genres of Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Margreta de Grazia and

Stanley Wells (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge: CUP,

2001), 83-98

Stott, Andrew, Comedy (New York and London: Routledge, 2005)

Wallace, Jennifer, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge: CUP, 2007)

Weitz, Eric, The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy (Cambridge: CUP, 2009)