This essay looks to bourgeois tragedy’s use of prose in the mid-eighteenth century as an episode in the histories of realism and emotion, arguing that the emergence of prosaic suffering on the period’s tragic stage helps to imagine modern forms of affliction. Taking Edward Moore’s 1753 drama The Gamester as emblematic of this shift, and situating the text in its performative and aesthetic contexts, I trace the “emotional practices” that navigated a range of confessedly “ordinary” feelings by evoking, engaging, and testing them across page and stage. Performing its grief with troubling immediacy and a raw intensity, in ways that were personal and familiar, absorptive rather than theatrical, and provocatively disenchanted, bourgeois tragedy thereby embodied a middling mode of existence in which the prosaic qualified not only the drama’s form but also, ultimately, its content.

中文翻译：

---

平淡无奇的痛苦

本文着眼于资产阶级悲剧在18世纪中叶作为现实主义和情感史上的一集散文的使用，认为该时期悲剧阶段的平淡无奇的苦难的出现有助于想象现代形式的苦难。我以爱德华·摩尔（Edward Moore）1753年的戏剧《 The Gameter》作为这一转变的象征，并将其文本置于其表现和美学环境中，通过追溯，参与和测试它们，探寻了“情感实践”，这些情感实践引导了一系列公认的“普通”感觉页面和舞台。以个人和熟悉的，吸收性的而不是戏剧性的，挑逗性的方式，以令人烦恼的即时性和原始的强度表现出悲伤，