Includes bibliographical references and index.

"This study of tragic fiction in British and European modernism brings together novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a Darwinian vision of nature. Both 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 and undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary biology. They saw in Greek drama a refutation of the progressivist narratives that proliferated among philosophical and anthropological studies of Greek tragedy and among non-Darwinian accounts of human origins and futures. 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"--