ABSTRACT
The familiar account of the history of tragedy takes it for granted that modernity brings it to a halt. Hence, presumably, the nostalgia that tinges our admiration for the genre: these works are great, but we have lost the secret of producing them. As George Steiner puts it in The Death of Tragedy, The decline of tragedy is inseparably related to the decline of the organic world view and of its attendant context of mythological, symbolic, and ritual reference.'1
