"Burgerliches Trauerspiel" or bourgeois tragedy is the most popularly acclaimed and critically documented form of German drama. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, some of Germany's greatest dramatists turned away from classical subjects and focused instead on the intricate internecine struggles of the middle class family.

Hart's study views bourgeois tragedy and related forms of "family" drama as being the enactment of a threat to stability, to bourgeois or domestic order, organized so as to defeat that threat and relieve the anxieties of a middle-class audience.

Within this framework, threats to stability are imagined as "feminine" and then represented as female figures who are then purged from the drama. The opposition of order and chaos, of law and its undoing, is embedded in the figure of a "bourgeois-tragic" father, who faces the dread possibility of being betrayed by a wife, or daughter, who challenges his authority or defies his command.

Proceeding from these basic assumptions, Hart reads a series of documents, from The London Merchant and Miss Sara Sampson to Hebbel's later Italian plays, as a cultural continuum marked by critical deviancies that include a catalogue of homosocial strategies (usurpation of the feminine or maternal, man-for-woman substitutions) and the regular reenactment of the Biblical myth of the Fall (the "original" challenge to paternal authority).