This book is concerned with literary responses to the tragic in the modern period. The tragic is, of course, derived from tragedy as a dramatic genre but it tended to have an independent existence almost from the start. Plato – a near contemporary of the major tragic dramatists – discussed tragedy without referring to any specific tragic drama and mentioned writers of tragedies only in passing, so that the tragic became an idea or a concept partially separate from Greek tragedy as a genre. On the surface, Aristotle in his Poetics is more objective and literary in his approach as he focuses on the form of tragic drama, and judged Sophocles' Oedipus the King to be the exemplary tragedy. It can be argued, however, that like Plato his real interest was in the tragic as an idea and that he valued the dramatic form of Oedipus because it could be aligned with his concept of the tragic, the play's plot – for him the most important element in tragedy – ‘produce[ing] the distinctively tragic effect of engendering phobos and eleos [fear and pity]’. Aristotle in effect elevated himself above the writers of tragedy, just as Plato did, suggesting that he understood its nature better than literary practitioners. One consequence of this for later writers of tragedy was to make it difficult to separate tragedy in general from Aristotle's poetics of tragedy, even if the play he had selected as his model tragedy was not necessarily typical of Greek tragedy in general.