ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book represents the emphasis in a number of ways, from Friedrich Nietzsche's account of the birth of tragedy through social anthropological accounts of the dramatisation of ritual in Northrop Frye's The Anatomy of Criticism, in the work of Jan Kott, Rene Girard and Wole Soyinka, and the critique of those foundations to be found in Jacques Derrida. Antonin Artaud aims to return Western theatre not to specific narratives of ancient Greek tragedy but to the kind of impact upon modern audiences that Greek tragedy undoubtedly had upon its own patrons. The resituation of tragedy within the purview of the social, associated in the first instance with the tradition of Marxist thought, has however taken on a different guise through an association with that line of thought which takes its cue from Nietzschean anti-rationalism.
