Towards a cultural philology

"In this book Amy Wygant reads Racine's Phedre (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 Notre'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."--BOOK JACKET.