Il disagio dell’innocenza: tragedia, teoria e romanzo moderno

This article is divided into a premise and two parts: in the first, the author discusses how, from Aristotle’s Poetics onwards, tragic theory and criticism have tackled the issue of innocence and undeserved suffering; in the second, by analyzing the conventional opposition between tragedy and the novel, the author claims that the idea of the novel as an anti-tragic genre stems from a substantially anti-tragic idea of tragedy itself, which proves very resilient in modern theories. Undeserved suffering is then discussed as a conceptual means to overcome this theoretical stalemate.