Customer Reviews (1)

Hardly a Classic
This is a little book in more ways than one: its ninety small pages of 12-point type (with very generous leading) contain 14 essays. Each addresses political aspects of heroism in a tragedy by one of the two great French classical playwrights, though Auchincloss does not (and, given the material) cannot strive for balance: Corneille dominates Racine 7:1. At least a third to a half of each essay consists of quotation (and plain prose translation) of key extracts; the rest is plot summary, "common-sense" character analysis, and rapid thematic interpretation. Inaccuracies turn up now and again in the résumés and portraits, while the "readings" are seldom more than pottedcommentary, echoes of French school editions and baccalauréat manuals. In short, a disappointing performance by one of our premier fiction writers and judges of writing. David Lee Rubin, French Department, University of Virginia ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

new ideas, informative, different
The book combines plays/works from different time periods and offers a different perspective of Corneille's L'illusion comique, while adding a study of a stil not yet well know play by Fernando Arrabal. ... Read more

Book Description
Women Reading Corneille: Feminist Psychocriticisms of Le Cid is a series of readings from the famous seventeenth-century French play, Pierre Corneille's Le Cid (1637). Using a reader-centered approach, this study applies five different examples of feminist psychoanalytic literary criticism to Corneille's masterpiece in order to illustrate the enduring interest of the play. At the same time, it explores several issues in the ongoing debates within feminist criticism. Topics such as biological essentialism, identity construction, and the conflict between Anglo-American and French feminist theory are discussed in the work of Carol Gilligan, Jessica Benjamin, Jane Gallop, Juliette Mitchell, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. Le Cid furnishes the framework for five divergent readings grounded in the seventeenth-century context, despite their emphasis on feminist reading practices of our era. ... Read more