This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence appears and persists in early modern French tragedy, a genre long understood as passionless and refusing all violence. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, can serve as a paradigm for this violence. An alternative to western philosophy’s ethical paradigm of Antigone, the Medean presence offers a model of radically persistent and disruptive outsiderness—for classical theater and its wake in literary theory ... More

This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence appears and persists in early modern French tragedy, a genre long understood as passionless and refusing all violence. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, can serve as a paradigm for this violence. An alternative to western philosophy’s ethical paradigm of Antigone, the Medean presence offers a model of radically persistent and disruptive outsiderness—for classical theater and its wake in literary theory. In the Wake of Medea explores a range of artistic strategies integrating violence into drama: rhetorical devices like ekphrasis, dramaturgical special effects, and shifts in temporal structures. The full range of this Medean presence appears in literal treatments of Medea (Médée, La Conquête de la Toison d’Or) and in tragedies figuratively invoking a Medean presence (Hercule mourant, Phèdre, Athalie). Of interest to specialists, political theorists, and students of theater, it explores works by well-known dramaturges (Racine, Corneille) alongside a breadth of neoclassical political theater (spectacular machine plays, Neo-Stoic parables, didactic Christian theater). In the Wake recognizes the Medean force within these tragedies, while also exploring why violence remains so integral to literature and arts today.