Courting Tragedy
The Lies of Locke Lamora, City Comedy, and Revenge Tragedy
Keywords:
Brian Attebery, Wendy Griswold, Linda Woodbridge, Scott Lynch, revenge tragedy, fantasyAbstract
Brian Attebery writes in Strategies of Fantasy (1992) about reading fantasy as a mode rather than a genre. Following his lead, I look at Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora (2006) as a revenge tragedy in the fantastic mode. I prove that the novel is a revenge tragedy by genre through tracing the elements commonly associated with Renaissance plays, as outlined in Wendy Griswold’s Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre 1576–1980 (1986). The Lies of Locke Lamora moves from city comedy to two different kinds of revenge tragedy, the English and the Senecan, of which the latter ends in disillusionment in terms of power hierarchies. Linda Woodbridge’s English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (2010) provides support for my argument that reading Lynch’s debut as a revenge tragedy reveals its political themes and places it in the context of the history of literature.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Veera Mäkelä

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Content in Fafnir is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0).
Beginning in November 2019, authors retain full copyright without restrictions. By publishing with Fafnir, authors grant a non-exclusive license to Fafnir to distribute the publisher’s version of the work, and give Fafnir permission to grant reprint and/or translation requests in accordance with our open-access policy and our Creative Commons license.
Prior to November 2019, copyright for all published material is held by Fafnir, but authors have full permission to use their work as they wish (i.e., self-archiving, reprint requests, using for other projects, etc.).
In both cases, re-use or re-posting of material published in Fafnir must acknowledge original publication and include a link to the publisher version.