Birth Marks: The Tragedy of Primogeniture in Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, and Jean Racine

by Richard E. Goodkin

Through a study of the evolution of inheritance issues in seventeen tragedies written over the course of half a century the Corneille brothers, Pierre and Thomas, and by Jean Racine, Richard E. Goodkin questions the pervasive assumption that classical tragedy, a form written for the aristocracy, is informed exclusively by an aristocratic ethic.

Instead, a fresh reading of both canonical and noncanonical texts demonstrates that even the most formal body of literature produced by French classical writers expresses a conflict between a declining aristocratic hierarchy based on inherited privilege and a rising capitalistic ethic that favors competition and enterprise.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 8, 2000

About the author

Richard E. Goodkin is Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a specialist of seventeenth-century French literature, but has also worked on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on ancient Greek tragedy.