This study of tragic fiction in European modernism brings together novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a Darwinian vision of nature. To their minds, both tragedy and natural history disclosed unwarranted suffering at the center of life. Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett broke with entrenched philosophical and scientific traditions that sought to exclude chance, undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary biology. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel uncovers a temporality central to tragic novels' structure and ethics: that of the moment. These authors made novelistic plot the delivery system for lethal natural and historical forces, and then countered such plot with moments of protest - characters' fleeting dissent against unjustifiable harms.

‘This is an extraordinarily erudite book about literary modernism and the relationship between it and the history and theory of tragedy. Lempert's overall discussion of Greek tragedy is absolutely riveting and her close-reading of form is extraordinarily sensitive. Lempert has produced an extraordinarily bold argument that is likely to attract a great deal of attention not only from modernist scholars but from others further afield.'

Ato Quayson - Stanford University, California

‘The themes of this book could hardly be more resonant and enduringly relevant to modernist literary studies. This book pits tragedy and modern writing against nihilism – a way of renouncing or not caring about existence – finding a way for moments of light to counter total eclipse of meaning without callow resolution or pat consolation.'

Ronan McDonald - University of Melbourne

‘… Lempert's book is an important contribution to the study of modernism … Recommended.’

A. P. Pennino Source: Choice