Corneille virtually founded seventeenth-century French tragedy: Le Cid and the three subsequent tragedies gave the genre its models and much of its theory. Many critics have created a synthetic picture of "Cornelian heroism" by seeing these four plays as representative of all Corneille's work, thus neglecting the sixteen others that followed. Now the tide has turned: scholars are trying to analyse the meaning of Cornielle's work with close reference to historical events and political ideas.

Since the nineteenth century, some of the most influential historians have portrayed opera and tragedy as wholly distinct cultural phenomena. These historians have denied a meaningful connection between the tragedy of the ancients and the efforts of early modern composers to arrive at styles that were intensely dramatic. Drawing on a series of case studies, Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi traces the productive, if at times rivalrous, relationship between opera and tragedy from the institution of French regular tragedy under Richelieu in the 1630s to the reform of opera championed by Calzabigi and Gluck in the late eighteenth century. Blair Hoxby and his fellow contributors shed light on “neighbouring forms” of theatre, including pastoral drama, tragédie en machines, tragédie en musique, and Goldoni’s dramma giocoso. Their analysis includes famous masterpieces by Corneille, Voltaire, Metastasio, Goldoni, Calzabigi, Handel, and Gluck, as well as lesser-known artists such as Luisa Bergalli, the first female librettist to write for the public theatre in Italy. Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi delves into a series of quarrels and debates in order to illuminate the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatre.

Professor Greenberg's lucid study examines the themes of authority, power and sexuality in Corneille's major plays, drawing on the work of Foucault, and Freudian and feminist critics. He begins by considering the question of myth and of a 'pre-historical' cultural memory in Médée, and proceeds to a detailed analysis of each of the four best-known tragedies: Le Cid, Horace, Cinna, and Polyeucte. A concluding chapter discusses two middle-period plays and Suréna, Corneille's last tragedy. Professor Greenberg argues that the formal symmetries of classical tragedy reflect a desire for control in the realm of both politics and sexuality. He also seeks to show how these principles of symmetry are challenged or undermined in various ways by the plays themselves. The result is an exacerbation of sexual and political desire which invests Cornelian tragedy with its peculiar power and involves us so deeply in its world.

With rare exceptions, English and American views of Corneille derive from that documentary approach that is more interested in a writer's times than in the writer. Perhaps more than any other major French writer, Corneille must be resurrected from the mass of documentation that has accumulated about him in nearly three centuries of criticism. Dr. Nelson's study, in line with much recent French criticism, concentrates primarily on the canon. The first book in English on this major European dramatist in over fifty years, this fresh return to the plays them­ selves presents a Corneille more varied and more flexible than the sententious figure passed down through decades of inordinate critical emphasis on the famed tetralogy (Le Cid, Horace, Cinna, Polyeucte). Thus, there is not only the familiar genereux of these plays, but also the damoiseau of the early comedies, the ambitieux of the middle plays, and the amoureux of the last plays. Through rigorous attention to the values of both the hero and the world Corneille creates about him in each of the thirty-two plays, Robert J. Nelson demonstrates in detail what some perceptive critics have hinted at in recent Corneille criticism: that Corneille's vision is not tragic. The drama of "The Father of French Tragedy" is, to be sure, "tragic" in the externals of composition (five acts, alexandrines, the fate of noble figures, etc.), but its essence is something else. What this something else is, and that even in our age of extreme deference to the "tragic vision" it in no way diminishes Corneille's stature, are the final arguments of this original study. Corneille: His Heroes and Their Worlds will appeal to all those with an interest in French Drama, as well as those studying the application of modern critical techniques to classical authors. Students of theory of tragedy will also find this new look at Corneillian "tragedy" stimulating.

Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille is a work of literary criticism by Benedetto Croce. Published in 1921, this volume contains one of Croce's first literary criticisms written in English. A section on Shakespeare also includes unique essays on Ariosto and Corneille, which together inaugurated a new era in literary criticism.

This study highlights that both Corneille and Racine were living writers, struggling to create developing forms within the strait-jacket of neo-classical decorum.

The book contains, then, eleven plays from the great age of French drama in the seventeenth century, one play from the prolific pen of Alexandra Hardy, who proceeded the great age, and on from the eighteenth century, the aftermath of that age.