Towards a Cultural Philology
Phèdre and the Construction of 'Racine'

Amy Wygant

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Research Monographs in French Studies 4

Legenda

1 July 1999  •  172pp

ISBN: 1-900755-14-9 (paperback)  •  RRP £75, $99, €85

EnlightenmentFrenchDrama

In this book Amy Wygant reads Racine's Phèdre (1677) through an analysis of its seventeenth-century cultural contexts and a consideration of its subsequent reception history. She explores the construction of Racinian language as 'musical', the poetics of the Racinian gaze, and Racine's labyrinthine eros of memory and forgetting. Reference is made to Lully's operas, the battle between the advocates of colour and the champions of drawing in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and Le Nôtre's centreless garden labyrinth at Versailles. These close textual and contextual studies relate the detail of the tragedy to the conceptual sweep of seventeenth-century absolutism. Wygant's interdisciplinary study draws on art and music history, as well as on emblematics, the history of the formal garden and the arts of memory. Racine's greatest threnody, the récit de Théramène, is shown as representative of expressions of loss which lie at the root of early modern literature.

Amy Wygant is a Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow.

Reviews:

  • ‘This book approaches Racine not primarily as a classicist, but as a playwright rooted in his own time... Through references to philosophy, art and music, Wygant interrogates the meaning of frequently used phrases such as 'the music of Racine'. This study draws together many strands of research through the juxtaposition of a multiplicity of areas and details.’ — Rosemary Arnoux, New Zealand Journal of French Studies 22.2, 2001, 43-4
  • ‘A fresh, clever, often entertaining book, about lots of things as well as Phèdre, and the brief volume is lavishly and revealing illustrated.’ — Richard Parish, Modern Language Review 96.1, 2001, 187-8 (full text online)

Bibliography entry:

Wygant, Amy, Towards a Cultural Philology: Phèdre and the Construction of 'Racine', Research Monographs in French Studies, 4 (Cambridge: Legenda, 1999)

First footnote reference: 35 Amy Wygant, Towards a Cultural Philology: Phèdre and the Construction of 'Racine', Research Monographs in French Studies, 4 (Cambridge: Legenda, 1999), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Wygant, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Wygant, Amy. 1999. Towards a Cultural Philology: Phèdre and the Construction of 'Racine', Research Monographs in French Studies, 4 (Cambridge: Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Wygant 1999: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Wygant 1999: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

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