The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630–1660

Engaging with recent thinking about performance, political theory and canon formation, this study explores the significance of the formal changes in seventeenth-century French theater. The author shows how the conceptualization of these shifts appropriates a rich body of Italian writing on questions of action, temporality and law, and in a series of new readings challenges a literary history that has read neoclassicism largely as a display of pure French style.