Noting significant differences between the individual tragedies of Racine and the many current notions of what "Racinian tragedy" is deemed to imply, John Campbell explores the identity and meaning of the modern "Racine." He asks if any one critical parad

In Bajazet and Mithridate Racine depicts the tragedies of characters who either wield tyrannic power or are subjected to tyranny. This international collection of essays deploys cutting-edge research to illuminate the plays and their contexts. The contributors to this volume examine Racine’s stagecraft, his exploration of space, sound and silence, his language, and the psychology of those who exercise power or who attempt to maintain their freedom in the face of oppression. The reception and reworking of his plays by contemporaries and subsequent generations round off this wide-ranging study.

Presents a theoretically informed reading of Racine's nine secular tragedies, from La Thebaide (1664) to Phedre (1677). This study focuses on literary/theatrical constructions of space, time, and identity.

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.

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.

Sentence structure in Racine is demonstrated to be a powerful tool for characterization, and here, basic features are explored in the seven tragedies of Racine--terminal punctuation, sentence length, sentence type, use of questions and the conditional, and rapid-fire exchanges between characters.