Teaching French Neoclassical Tragedy

Tragedy has been reborn many times since antiquity. Seventeenth-century French playwrights composed tragedies marked by neoclassical aesthetics and the divine-right absolutism of the grand si cle. But their works also speak to the modern imagination, inspiring reactions from Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, adaptations and reworkings by C saire and Kushner, and new productions by francophone and anglophone directors.

This volume addresses both the history of French neoclassical tragedy--its audiences, performance practice, and development as a genre--and the ideas these works raise, such as necessity, free will, desire, power, and moral behavior in the face of limited choices. Essays demonstrate ways to teach the plays through a variety of lenses, such as performance, spectatorship, aesthetics, rhetoric, and affect. The book also explores postcolonial engagement, by writers and directors both in and outside France, with these works.