CATASTROPHE

(Yunanca köken — orijinale bakınız.) In modern literary language, the final event of a drama or romance, to which the other events are subsidiarj^. The TipnTiTUot,,^ or revolution, indicated by Aristotle as ons of the parts of the drama, was a change in the fortunes of the principal personages of the play; as, the fall of CEdipus from sovereignty into extreme misery and banishment, in the CEdipus Tyrannus. Some such change is generally involved in the idea of a catastrophe: thus, marriage is the ordinary catastrophe of a comedy or a novel, as some disastrous change is that of a tragedy. [s. 214]