noun
definition
An obsessive fan, a superfan
definition
A writer of tragedy.
definition
A tragedy; a tragic drama.
adjective
definition
Causing great sadness or suffering.
definition
Relating to tragedy in a literary work.
definition
(in tabloid newspapers) Having been the victim of a tragedy.
example
2008, Search for tragic Madeleine McCann over (in The Daily Telegraph of Australia, 14 February 2008) http//www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/search-for-maddie-over/story-e6freuy9-1111115550129
Examples of tragic in a Sentence
What a sad and tragic life poor Annie led.
It was a tragic love story, one she knew the end to and dreaded seeing how it came to be that way.
She shoved the photo back into the envelope and closed the lip, willing herself not to think about the previous pregnancy and its tragic end.
In the tragic poets the tale takes a different form.
His troubles with his subjects were closely connected with the tragic dissensions in his own family.
His episcopate, however, is chiefly remembered owing to its tragic close.
His infidelity to his wife and his harshness towards his son Carlino are blemishes on a splendid career, but he more than expiated these faults by his tragic end.
When asked what he was doing when he was arrested, Pierre replied in a rather tragic manner that he was restoring to its parents a child he had saved from the flames.
I realize in most ways Edith isn't deserving of too much sympathy, but I still think of her as a tragic figure.
Their tragic end was afterwards immortalized in the Divina commedia.
Monuments of the tragic story were shown by the Romans in the time of Livy (the altar of Janus Curiatius near the sororium tigillum, the "sister's beam," or yoke under which Horatius had to pass; and the altar of Juno Sororia).
Modern history knows no more tragic figure than that of Alexander.
Yet his power of touching the springs of tragic awe and horror is a genuine poetical gift, of the same kind as that which is displayed by some of the early English dramatists.
Here Sassoon seems to achieve the status of a tragic hero.
When she made reference to the tragic story, the whole room burst into tears.
The scheme, in the main the work of Sieyes, was refused by the Convention, who submitted the whole question to a special commission of six, which under the influence of Robespierre adopted a report by Michel le Peletier de Saint Fargeau shortly before his tragic death.
It is a serious flaw in the play that the fate of the heroine is virtually decided before the curtain rises, and the poet is obliged to create by theatrical devices the semblance of a tragic conflict which, in reality, does not exist.
A visit to Switzerland in the summer of 1775 may not have weakened his interest in her, but it at least allowed him to regard her objectively; and, without tragic consequences on either side, the passion was ultimately allowed to yield to the dictates of common-sense.
Again poetic justice is effected on the unfortunate hero who has chosen his own personal advancement in preference to his duty to the woman he loves; more pointedly than in Gotz is the moral enforced by Clavigo's worldly friend Carlos, that the ground of Clavigo's tragic end lies not so much in the defiance of a moral law as in the hero's vacillation and want of character.
In 1874 he published his last great romance, the tragic and historic poem in prose called Quatrevingt-treize; a work as rich in thought, in tenderness, in wisdom and in humour and in pathos, as ever was cast into the mould of poetry or of fiction.
This tragic contrast is emphasized by the pomp and circumstance that surround the ill-fated hero of the story at the beginning.
My daughter, in her mid 30's, recently lost her husband to a tragic accident.
Suicide is always tragic because it cuts life short, but people who suffer hardship and distress deserve compassion.
Did you know, for example, that eighteenth century dramatists routinely changed his endings because they were too tragic?
We may find a fair parallel by imagining two plays drawn at hazard from the works of the great tragic writers.
Interest is confined to the actions, passions, sufferings and joys of human life, to its pathetic, tragic, humorous and sentimental incidents.
Thus in the plays of Rucellai, Trissino, Sperone and other tragic poets the nobler elements of humanism, considered as a revelation of the world and man, obtained no free development.
Soon he was transferred to Abydos, amidst the almost tragic consternation of his deluded followers.
Athanagild himself is chiefly remembered for the tragic fortunes of his daughters Brunechildis and Gavleswintha, who married two Frankish brother kings, Sigebert and Chilperic. Athanagild died ("peacefully," as the annalist remarks) in 547.
Both these rulers, by the institution of separate and almost independent duchies, attempted to introduce into Sweden a feudal system similar to that already established elsewhere in Europe; but the danger of thus weakening the realm by partition was averted, though not without violent and tragic complications.
Among the tragic writers of the age we may mention Dalin, Gyllenborg, and Erik Wrangel (1686-1765).
Gudmund Goran Adlerbeth (1751-1818) made translations from the classics and from the Norse, and was the author of a successful tragic opera, Cora och Alonzo (1782).
The tragic story is the subject of the Hecuba of Euripides, the Troades of Seneca and the Polyxena of Sophocles, of which only a few fragments remain.
History became the tragic spectacle of a game of dupes - the real movers being priests, kings or warriors.
He was articled as a law clerk in Edinburgh, and his Elegy on Craigmillar Castle (1776) was printed during his clerkship. In 1781 he removed to London to devote himself to literary work, publishing in the same year a volume of Rimes of no great merit, and Scottish Tragic Ballads.
Under the title of Select Scottish Ballads he reprinted in 1783 his tragic ballads, with a supplement comprising Ballads of the Comic Kind.
His own last year, 478 B.C., dawned on him with the tragic end of his next beloved disciple, Tze-lu.
Swift's grave humour and power of enforcing momentous truth by ludicrous exaggeration were next displayed in his Modest Proposal for Preventing the' Children of Poor People from being a Burden to their Parents or the Country, by fattening and eating them (1729), a parallel to the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, and as great a masterpiece of tragic as the latter is of comic irony.
Thus an object of pity as well as awe, he is the most tragic figure in our literature - the only man of his age who could be conceived as affording a groundwork for one of the creations of Shakespeare.
Two events now occurred which served to cast a gloom over the poet's life and to interrupt his activity, - the outbreak of the Civil War, and the tragic fate of his wife, who, having accidentally allowed her dress to catch fire, was burnt to death in her own house in 1861.
Terror and pity had never found on the stage word or expression which so exactly realized the ideal aim of tragic poetry among the countrymen of Aeschylus and Sophocles since the time or since the passing of Shakespeare, of Marlowe and of Webster.
Angelo, Tyran de Padoue (1835), the last of the tragic triad to which their creator denied the transfiguration of tragic verse, is inferior to neither in power of imagination and of style, in skill of invention and construction, and in mastery over all natural and noble sources of pity and of terror.
La Esmeralda, the libretto of an opera founded on his great tragic romance of Notre-Dame de Paris, is a miracle of lyric melody and of skilful adaptation.
As a tragic monodrama it is incomparable for sustained power and terrible beauty.
In 1831 appeared the greatest of all tragic or historic or romantic poems in the form of prose narrative, Norte-Dame de Paris.
Between this opening and this close the pageant of history and of legend, marshalled and vivified by the will and the hand of the poet, ranges through an infinite variety of action and passion, of light and darkness, of terror and pity, of lyric rapture and of tragic triumph.
The first volume published of his posthumous works was the exquisite and splendid Thedtre en liberte, a sequence if not a symphony of seven poems in dramatic form, tragic or comic or fanciful eclogues, incomparable with the work of any other man but the author of The Tempest and The Winter's Tale in combination and alternation of gayer and of graver harmonies.
Her chief tragic roles were Ophelia a Juliet, Desdemona, Queen Anne in Richard III., Louisa Miller, Maria Stuart, Schiller's Princess Eboli, Marion Delorme, Victor Hugo's Tisbe and Slowacki's Mazeppa.
His qualities are not those of the great masters of fiction; but he had an inexhaustible imagination, some faculty for simple combination of incident, a homely tragic force which is very genuine and effective, and up to a certain point a fine narrative power.
They found a brilliant interpreter in Aeschines, who, after having been a tragic actor and a clerk to the assembly, had entered political life with the advantages of a splendid gift for eloquence, a fine presence, a happy address, a ready wit and a facile conscience.