Tragic passages

About this book

"Tragic Passages presents a new, theoretically informed reading of Racine's nine secular tragedies, from La Thebaide (1664) to Phedre (1677). This detailed study focuses on literary and theatrical constructions of space, time, and identity. Roland Racevskis argues that Racine places his characters in a position of limbo, between the self and the other, between what is onstage and what is offstage, between life and death, the transcendent and the terrestrial, and the personal and the public. Racine's secular tragedies thus highlight the paradoxical human predicament of being caught in between states of being and develop aesthetics of the threshold. Racevskis demonstrates how Racine's tragedies explore multiple intermediary spaces of experience, from the personal to the eschatological, and thus undertake a sustained inquiry into philosophical questions of world limits and of the boundaries of human experience, questions that have become urgent in the present day."--BOOK JACKET.