Read complete books and articles on: Jean Racine

Racine, Jean - zhäN räsēnˈ, 1639–99, French dramatist. Racine is the prime exemplar of French classicism. The nobility of his Alexandrine verse, the simplicity of his diction, the psychological realism of his characters, and the skill of his dramatic construction contribute to the continued popularity of his plays. Educated at Port-Royal, he broke with his Jansenist masters over his love for the theater. His first dramatic attempts, La Thébaïde (1664) and Alexandre le Grand (1665), were imitations of Corneille. With Andromaque (1667), a tragedy after Euripides, Racine supplanted Corneille as France's leading tragic dramatist. Corneille's friends, including Racine's former friend Molière, tried to ruin the young playwright, but the backing of Louis XIV and later of Boileau saved him. Racine's next play, Les Plaideurs (1668), wittily satirizes the law courts. His subsequent plays are milestones in French literature—Britannicus (1669); Bérénice (1670); Bajazet (1672); Mithridate (1673); Iphigénie en Aulide (1674); Phèdre (1677). After a concerted attack on Phèdre, Racine, in a revulsion against his irregular life, gave up the theater. In the same year he married and was appointed official historiographer by Louis XIV. Mme de Maintenon persuaded him to write Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691) for performance at Saint-Cyr. These differ from the earlier plays in their biblical subjects and use of a chorus and in the length of Esther, which has three acts instead of five. There are many English translations of Racine, among them those of John Masefield, Lacy Lockert, Kenneth Muir, and Robert Lowell.

See biography by G. Brereton (rev. ed. 1974); studies by R. Barthes (tr. 1964), P. France (1966), M. Turnell (1972), P. J. Yarrow (1978), and L. Goldman (1981).

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Jean Racine

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Jean Racine: A Critical Biography » Read Now
by Geoffrey Brereton. 362 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...JEAN RACINE RACINE IN HIS THIRTIES. Musee de Versailles...Mignard. Portrait re-discovered in 1949. JEAN RACINE A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY BY GEOFFREY BRERETON...1639. DECEMBER 22...
2.

Mid-Career Tragedies (Includes "Berenice," "Bajazet," "Mithridate," and "Iphigenie") » Read Now
by Jean Racine. 371 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
3.

Aspects of Racinian Tragedy » Read Now
by John C. Lapp. 195 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
4.

Word as Action: Racine, Rhetoric, and Theatrical Language » Read Now
by Michael Hawcroft. 278 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Hawcroft presents an exploration of the theatrical qualities of the language of France's greatest tragedian, Jean Racine, taking as its analytical tool two neglected parts of rhetoric--inventio and dispositio. Racine's dialogue is exciting, Hawcroft argues, because he makes persuasive interaction of...
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Hawcroft presents an exploration of the theatrical qualities of the language of France's greatest tragedian, Jean Racine, taking as its analytical tool two neglected parts of rhetoric--inventio and dispositio. Racine's dialogue is exciting, Hawcroft argues, because he makes persuasive interaction of characters a key feature of his dramatic technique. This book shows how Racine deploys persuasion in well-defined contexts: trials, embassies, and councils; informal oratory as protagonists try to manipulate each other and their confidants in order to make their own views and wishes prevail; self-persuasion in monologues; and narrations, often used by characters with persuasive intent. The book draws illuminating and provocative comparisons with other playwrights and offers a closer and better documented description of the specific nature of Racine's theatrical language than has previously been available in any one study.
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5.

Last Periods of Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen » Read Now
by Kenneth Muir. 117 pgs.

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6.

Freedom, Slavery, and Absolutism: Corneille, Pascal, Racine » Read Now
by Ziad Elmarsafy. 198 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
7.

The Anxiety of Senecan Influence in Racine, or Phedre in the Labyrinth, in The Romanic Review » Read Now
by Stephen Bold. 15 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
8.

Subjective Dispersion in Iphigenie or the Unbearable Fullness of Being, in French Forum » Read Now
by Roland Racevskis. 14 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
9.

Beyond the Promise: Racine's Andromaque, in Symposium » Read Now
by Harriet Stone. 20 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Words: Reflections on Racines Andromaque," Romanic...336. 3, Jean Starobinski, LOeil...standards. 5. Jean Racine, Oeuvres completes...classical theater, see Jean-Marie...
10.

Matricide and Filicide in Racine's Athalie, in Symposium » Read Now
by Helen Bates McDermott. 14 pgs.

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...MCDERMOTT MATRICIDE AND FILICIDE IN RACINES ATHALIE " Ou menez-vous ces enfants...idol-worshipping Queen Athalie is the subject of Racines cruellest and bloodiest tragedy...
11.

The Classical Model: Literature and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century France (Chap. Two "Perspectives on Knowledge: Andromaque and Berenice") » Read Now
by Harriet Stone. 238 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Literature has its own strategies for ordering information. In this elegant and insightful book about the formation of knowledge in seventeenth-century France, Harriet Stone asks what those strategies conveyed about the limits of science and about the cultural environment of the period. A propensity...
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Literature has its own strategies for ordering information. In this elegant and insightful book about the formation of knowledge in seventeenth-century France, Harriet Stone asks what those strategies conveyed about the limits of science and about the cultural environment of the period. A propensity for reason and control pervaded literature as well as science, allowing classical literature to serve as a unique laboratory for exploring the model of representation developed by science. Literary texts have influenced the establishment and transformation of the paradigms grounding knowledge by drawing attention to meanings that the paradigms fail to name. Stone identifies not only the momentous achievement of the discovery of the scientific method but also the more subtle process of experimentation in literature through which ideas were continually tested and redefined. She offers close readings of works by Rotrou, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, La Rochefoucauld, and Lafayette, as well as by Descartes,Furetiere,,and Pascal. Her first and last chapters frame the literary texts within a discussion of Foucault's analysis of classical science. Classical writers began to encode their own world. Once they did, not only science but literature became an authority for mapping knowledge. Notwithstanding the classical period's efforts to affirm the unity of knowledge, Stone concludes that knowledge was never complete or certain. Literature's capacity to rework the model through which it assigns meanings proves essential to unfolding both the art and the science of representation.
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12.

Sounding the Classics: From Sophocles to Thomas Mann (Chap. 7 "In Flames and Tears: Racine's Phaedra") » Read Now
by Rudolph Binion. 166 pgs.

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This book is a comparative study of twelve works of fiction broadly representative of the Western canon. Its aim is to discover what gives these 12 works their lasting appeal and vitality over and beyond their formal qualities. It focuses on the interplay of "text" and "subtext" within each work...
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This book is a comparative study of twelve works of fiction broadly representative of the Western canon. Its aim is to discover what gives these 12 works their lasting appeal and vitality over and beyond their formal qualities. It focuses on the interplay of "text" and "subtext" within each work after defining these terms at the outset. It then compares its twelve sample classics systematically in a conclusion that argues from the works themselves to classics in general.
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13.

Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism (Chap. 5 "Racine's Oedipus: Virtual Bodies, Originary Fantasies") » Read Now
by Mitchell Greenberg. 278 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Psychology, Entire Library

Mitchell Greenberg explores the significance of fantasies of the body in seventeenth-century France through provocative and subtle readings of some of the most intriguing texts of the period.
Beginning with an eloquent invocation of the status of the king in classical France, Greenberg surveys the...
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Mitchell Greenberg explores the significance of fantasies of the body in seventeenth-century France through provocative and subtle readings of some of the most intriguing texts of the period.
Beginning with an eloquent invocation of the status of the king in classical France, Greenberg surveys the complex sociopolitical history of Louis XIV's reign, analyzing both Moliere and the entire corpus of Racine. The central chapters of Baroque Bodies deal with such fascinating texts as the Memoires of the abbe de Choisy (the first existing account of a male cross-dresser); two founding texts of the modern pornographic genre, L'ecole des filles and L'academie des dames; and the "autobiography" of Marie de l'Incarnation, the famous "mystic" and founder of the first Ursuline convent in Canada.
In addition to his richly nuanced readings, Greenberg integrates into his argument material from a broad array of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, feminism, epistemology, and history. He also points out the implications of his argument for the political, theological, and historical thought of the period, moving effortlessly from witch trials in France to discussions of bodies in Renaissance English literary criticism to the works of Bakhtin, Foucault, Freud, and Lacan.
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14.

Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-Century France (Chap. IX "Racine Learns to Be a Historiographer") » Read Now
by Orest A. Ranum. 362 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
15.

Rhetoric: Readings in French Literature ("Rhetoric at Court: Racine's Britannicus" begins on p. 97) » Read Now
by Michael Hawcroft. 270 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, whether spoken or written. In the first chapter of Rhetoric: Readings in French Literature, Michael Hawcroft sets out its principles comprehensively and lucidly, providing an easily-consulted outline of key terms and a wide range of illustrative examples...
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Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, whether spoken or written. In the first chapter of Rhetoric: Readings in French Literature, Michael Hawcroft sets out its principles comprehensively and lucidly, providing an easily-consulted outline of key terms and a wide range of illustrative examples. Subsequent chapters explore rhetoric at work in different genres, via close reading of texts which range from the drama of Molière, Racine, and Beckett; Montaigne, Sévigné, and Gide on the self; the prose fiction of Laclos, Zola, and Sarraute; poetry by D'Aubigné, Baudelaire, and Césaire; and the oratory of de Gaulle and Yourcenar. Rhetorical analysis uncovers subtleties and complexities in texts which emerge as exciting dramas of communication. This is at once a handbook of rhetoric and a guide to its application to French texts from the sixteenth century to the present.
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16.

After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory ("Racine and la Nouvelle Critique" begins on p. 11) » Read Now
by Colin Davis. 210 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In the last decades of the twentieth century, French poststructuralist 'theory' transformed the humanities; it also met with resistance and today we frequently hear that theory is 'dead'.In this brilliantly argued volume, Colin Davis:*reconsiders key arguments for and against theory, identifying...
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In the last decades of the twentieth century, French poststructuralist 'theory' transformed the humanities; it also met with resistance and today we frequently hear that theory is 'dead'.In this brilliantly argued volume, Colin Davis:*reconsiders key arguments for and against theory, identifying significant misreadings*reassesses the contribution of poststructuralist thought to the critical issues of knowledge, ethics, hope and identity*sheds new light on the work of Jean-FranÃ§ois Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser and Julia Kristeva in a stunning series of readings*offers a fresh perspective on recent debates around the death of theory.In closing he argues that theory may change, but it will not go away. After poststructuralism, then, comes the afterlife of poststructuralism.Wonderfully accessible, this is an account of the past and present fortunes of theory, suitable for anyone researching, teaching, or studying in the field. And yet it is much more than this. Colin Davis provides a way forward for the humanities - a way forward in which theory will play a crucial part.
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