Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.2, 2023

 

The Generating Context, Theoretical Connotation and Aesthetic Value of Marx and Engels’ Theory of Tragedy

(Abstract)

 

Chen Shuying

 

In the context of the bourgeois revolution that swept Europe in 1848, Marx and Engels, through their criticism of Lassalle’s Franz von Sickingen, transformed Hegel’s theory of tragic contradiction into a necessary contradiction between the old and the new in the law of historical development from the perspective of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, which frees tragedy from the scope of a single artistic genre and places it in a broader social context, setting higher requirements for the thematic content, artistic truth and philosophical purpose of tragedy, and breaking away from the traditional Western concept of tragedy, and thus has a very important aesthetic value.