In the Wake of Medea: Neoclassical Theater and the Arts of Destruction

In the Wake of Medea examines the violence of seventeenth-century French political dramas. French tragedy has traditionally been taken to be a passionless, cerebral genre that refused all forms of violence. This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence persists, contextualizing it in a longer literary and philosophical history from Ovid to Pasolini.

The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns dow...