Tragic Hero: From Aristotle’s Poetics to Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Tragedy is a term applied to a type of drama in which the protagonist due to a flaw experiences catastrophe. This catastrophe or suffering might be the death of the tragic hero or a bitter discovery that equals death. The term which has its origin in Greek religious festivals has seen changes during the centuries keeping its essence. As an instance the hero of a high rank who changes to middle class bourgeois. Though the term tragedy was applied to a type of drama after the appearance of novels in ۱۸th C. some novels were considered tragic too. Thomas Hardy’s novels with his heroes and heroines suffering, with their dark lives and the sad ending of the novels are regarded as tragic novels. In this paper we tried to compare the tragic hero from what first was defined by Aristotle to what we see in a ۲۰th C. novel of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Keywords:

“Tragic hero” , “Tragedy” , “Aristotle” , “ Tess of the d’Urbervilles” , “Thomas Hardy”