Andromaque by Jean Racine (Book Analysis)

Andromaque by Jean Racine (Book Analysis)
Author: Bright Summaries
Publisher: BrightSummaries.com
Total Pages: 21
Release: 2017-03-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 2806288185

Unlock the more straightforward side of Andromaque with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Andromaque by Jean Racine, which tells the tragic story of the passion of four characters who fall into unrequited love, leading to their despair and, eventually, untimely demise. It remains Racine’s most-performed play and a pioneering work of the tragic genre. Racine is one of France’s most renowned dramatists and is still considered a revolutionary genius in the literary domain. Find out everything you need to know about Andromaque in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

Andromache and Other Plays

Andromache and Other Plays
Author: Jean Racine
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1967
Genre: Andromache (Legendary character)
ISBN: 9780140441956

Four French Plays

Four French Plays
Author: Jean Racine
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0141392096

The 'greatest hits' of French classical theatre, in vivid and acclaimed new Penguin translations by John Edmunds and with editorial apparatus by Joseph Harris. The plays in this volume - Cinna, The Misanthrope, Andromache and Phaedra - span only thirty-seven years, but make up the defining period of French theatre. In Corneille's Cinna (1640), absolute power is explored in ancient Rome, while Molière's The Misanthrope (1666), the only comedy in this collection, sees its anti-hero outcast for his refusal to conform to social conventions. Here also are two key plays by Racine: Andromache (1667), recounting the tragedy of Hector's widow after the Trojan War, and Phaedre (1677), showing a mother crossing the bounds of love with her son. This translation of Phaedra was originally broadcast on Radio Three with a cast including Prunella Scales and Timothy West, and was praised by playwright Harold Pinter. This is the first time it has been published. The edition also includes an introduction by Joseph Harris, genealogical tables, pronunciation guides, critiques and prefaces, as well as a chronology and suggested further reading. After a varied career as an actor, teacher, and BBC TV national newsreader, John Edmunds became the founder-director of Aberystwyth University's department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies. Joseph Harris is Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London and author of Hidden Agendas: Cross-Dressing in Seventeenth-Century France (2005).

Queer Velocities

Queer Velocities
Author: Jennifer Eun-Jung Row
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2022-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810144727

Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage explores how seventeenth-century French theater represents queer desire. In this book, the first queer theoretical treatment of canonical French theater, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row proposes that these velocities, moments of unseemly haste or strategic delay, sparked new kinds of attachments, intimacies, and erotics. Rather than rely on fixed identities or analog categories, we might turn to these affectively saturated moments of temporal sensation to analyze queerness in the premodern world. The twin innovations of precise, portable timepieces and the development of the theater as a state institution together ignited new types of embodiments, orderly and disorderly pleasures, and normative and wayward rhythms of life. Row leverages a painstakingly formalist and rhetorical analysis of tragedies by Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille to show how the staging of delay or haste can critically interrupt the normative temporalities of marriage, motherhood, mourning, or sovereignty—the quotidian rhythms and paradigms so necessary for the biopolitical management of life. Row’s approach builds on the queer turn to temporality and Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of the chronobiopolitical to wager that queerness can also be fostered by the sensations of disruptive speed and slowness. Ultimately, Row suggests that the theater not only contributed to the glitter of Louis XIV’s absolutist spectacle but also ignited new forms of knowing and feeling time, as well as new modes of loving, living, and being together.

The Litigants

The Litigants
Author: Jean Racine
Publisher:
Total Pages: 50
Release: 1882
Genre:
ISBN:

Phaedra by Jean Racine (Book Analysis)

Phaedra by Jean Racine (Book Analysis)
Author: Bright Summaries
Publisher: BrightSummaries.com
Total Pages: 23
Release: 2015-12-21
Genre: Study Aids
ISBN: 2806270340

Unlock the more straightforward side of Phaedra with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Phaedra by Jean Racine, which tells the story of its eponymous heroine, whose unrequited love causes the misfortune of all those around her. A gripping illustration of the power of words based on a story of Greek mythology, Phaedra remains as successful today as it was several centuries ago. Racine's poetry are often considered untranslatable due to their specific use of French linguistics, yet many translators have tried and so his work is popular around the world thanks to his passionate characters and psychological insight. Find out everything you need to know about Phaedra in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you in your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

Racine’s Roman Tragedies

Racine’s Roman Tragedies
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2022-01-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004504818

In two of his most celebrated plays, Britannicus and Bérénice, Racine depicts the tragedies of characters trapped by the ideals, desires, and cruelties of ancient Rome. This international collection of essays deploys cutting-edge research to illuminate the plays and their contexts.

Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great
Author: Jean Racine
Publisher: Digireads.Com
Total Pages: 42
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781420948868

The 17th century dramatist Jean Racine was considered, along with Moliere and Corneille, as one of the three great playwrights of his era. The quality of Racine's poetry has been described as possibly his most important contribution to French literature and his use of the alexandrine poetic line is one of the best examples of such use noted for its harmony, simplicity and elegance. While critics over the centuries have debated the worth of Jean Racine, at present, he is widely considered a literary genius of revolutionary proportions. In this volume of Racine's plays we find "Alexander the Great," the second of twelve plays by the author. As you would expect the drama concerns its titular character and his love for the Indian princess Cleofile. Based largely on the histories of Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, Alexander finds his pursuit of love of the Indian princess complicated by intrigues between her brother Taxilus and his ally Porus.

Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Voltaire

Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Voltaire
Author: Paul Hammond
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2021-10-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004467378

Are we free agents? This perennial question is addressed by tragedy when it dramatizes the struggle of individuals with supernatural forces, or maps the inner conflict of a mind divided against itself. The first part of this book follows the adaptations of four myths as they migrate from classical Greek tragedy to Seneca and on to seventeenth-century France: the stories of Agamemnon, Oedipus, Medea, and Phaedra. Detailed linguistic analysis charts the playwrights’ contrasting assumptions about agency and autonomy. In the second part, six plays by Corneille and Racine are discussed to show how the problem of agency and free will is explored in scenarios which show protagonists who are in thrall to their past, to their rulers, or to their own ideals.