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Literary historians and critics who have written on the influence of Racine in England during the neoclassical period apparently have assumed that the English translators and adapters of Racine’s plays in general succeeded in presenting the real Racine to the English public. Katherine Wheatley here reveals the wide discrepancy between avowed intentions and actual results. Among the English plays she compares with their French originals are Otway’s Titus and Berenice, Congreve’s The Mourning Bride, and Philips’s The Distrest Mother. These comparisons, fully supported by quoted passages, reveal that those among the English public and contemporary critics who could not themselves read French had no chance whatever to know the real Racine: “The adapters and translators, so-called, had eliminated Racine from his tragedies before presenting them to the public.” Unacknowledged excisions and additions, shifts in plot, changes in dénouement, and frequent mistranslation turned Racine’s plays into “wretched travesties.” Two translations of Britannicus, intended for reading rather than for acting, are especially revealing in that they show which Racinian qualities eluded the British translators even when they were not trying to please an English theatergoing audience. Why it is, asks the author, that no English dramatist could or would present Racine as he is to the English public of the neoclassical period? To answer this question she traces the development of Aristotelian formalism in England, showing the relation of the English theory of tragedy to French classical doctrine and the relation of the English adaptations of Racine to the English neoclassical theory of tragedy. She concludes that “deliberate alterations made by the English, far from violating classical tenets, bring Racine’s tragedies closer to the English neoclassical ideal than they were to begin with, and this despite the fact that some tenets of English doctrine came from parallel tenets widely accepted in France.” She finds that “in the last analysis, French classical doctrine was itself a barrier to the understanding of Racinian tragedy in England and an incentive to the sort of change English translators and adapters made in Racine.” This paradox she explains by the fact that Racine himself had broken with the classical tradition as represented by Corneille.
Literary historians and critics who have written on the influence of Racine in England during the neoclassical period apparently have assumed that the English translators and adapters of Racine’s plays in general succeeded in presenting the real Racine to the English public. Katherine Wheatley here reveals the wide discrepancy between avowed intentions and actual results. Among the English plays she compares with their French originals are Otway’s Titus and Berenice, Congreve’s The Mourning Bride, and Philips’s The Distrest Mother. These comparisons, fully supported by quoted passages, reveal that those among the English public and contemporary critics who could not themselves read French had no chance whatever to know the real Racine: “The adapters and translators, so-called, had eliminated Racine from his tragedies before presenting them to the public.” Unacknowledged excisions and additions, shifts in plot, changes in dénouement, and frequent mistranslation turned Racine’s plays into “wretched travesties.” Two translations of Britannicus, intended for reading rather than for acting, are especially revealing in that they show which Racinian qualities eluded the British translators even when they were not trying to please an English theatergoing audience. Why it is, asks the author, that no English dramatist could or would present Racine as he is to the English public of the neoclassical period? To answer this question she traces the development of Aristotelian formalism in England, showing the relation of the English theory of tragedy to French classical doctrine and the relation of the English adaptations of Racine to the English neoclassical theory of tragedy. She concludes that “deliberate alterations made by the English, far from violating classical tenets, bring Racine’s tragedies closer to the English neoclassical ideal than they were to begin with, and this despite the fact that some tenets of English doctrine came from parallel tenets widely accepted in France.” She finds that “in the last analysis, French classical doctrine was itself a barrier to the understanding of Racinian tragedy in England and an incentive to the sort of change English translators and adapters made in Racine.” This paradox she explains by the fact that Racine himself had broken with the classical tradition as represented by Corneille.
An English translation, in rhyming couplets, of the French playwright Jean Racine's Iphigenia. Includes critical notes and commentary.
This study brings to light the significant and long-obscured influence of the Roman dramatist and philosopher, Seneca, on the works of Racine. After describing the positive characteristics of Senecan tragedy and the crucial role it played in French drama from Jodelle through Corneille, Ronald W. Tobin analyzes Racine's unique adoption and absorption of Senecan material into his own plays, thereby extending the dimensions of his dramatic art. In the book's Conclusion, some theories are advanced for Racine's well-known silence about his debt to Seneca.
Designed for the general reader, this splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D.—the date of the earliest surviving document in any Romance language—to the present decade is the most compact and imaginative single-volume guide available in English to the French literary tradition. In fact, no comparable work exists in either language. It is not the customary inventory of authors and titles but rather a collection of wide-angled views of historical and cultural phenomena. It sets before us writers, public figures, criminals, saints, and monarchs, as well as religious, cultural, and social revolutions. It gives us books, paintings, public monuments, even TV shows. Written by 164 American and European specialists, the essays are introduced by date and arranged in chronological order, but here ends the book’s resemblance to the usual history of literature. Each date is followed by a headline evoking an event that indicates the chronological point of departure. Usually the event is literary—the publication of an original work, a journal, a translation, the first performance of a play, the death of an author—but some events are literary only in terms of their repercussions and resonances. Essays devoted to a genre exist alongside essays devoted to one book, institutions are presented side by side with literary movements, and large surveys appear next to detailed discussions of specific landmarks. No article is limited to the “life and works” of a single author. Proust, for example, appears through various lenses: fleetingly, in 1701, apropos of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights; in 1898, in connection with the Dreyfus Affair; in 1905, on the occasion of the law on the separation of church and state; in 1911, in relation to Gide and their different treatments of homosexuality; and at his death in 1922. Without attempting to cover every author, work, and cultural development since the Serments de Strasbourg in 842, this history succeeds in being both informative and critical about the more than 1,000 years it describes. The contributors offer us a chance to appreciate not only French culture but also the major critical positions in literary studies today. A New History of French Literature will be essential reading for all engaged in the study of French culture and for all who are interested in it. It is an authoritative, lively, and readable volume.
Richard A. Brooks, general editor, v.
Gregory S. Brown's A Field of Honor: The Identities of Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in the French Intellectual Field from Racine to the Revolution offers a multilevel study of the intellectual, social, and institutional contexts of dramatic authorship and the world of playwrights in 18th-century Paris. Brown deftly interweaves research in archival and printed materials, case studies of individual authorial strategies, the rich, often contentious historiography on the French Enlightenment and contemporary cultural theory and criticism. Drawing on a sophisticated array of recent studies, Brown positions his work against and between the grain of alternative approaches and interpretations. He combines scholarship on the history of the book with analyses of political culture and cultural identity, leaving the reader with a strong and revealing appreciation for the tensions and crosscurrents staged at the center of the 18th-century "republic of letters."
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.