Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1963. Moliere's plays rank among the great comic achievements in the history of the stage. Yet few attempts have been made to understand them as expressing the historical context of the author's time. Most frequently they have been interpreted from the point of view of purely literary history, while the characters have been seen as universal comic types. Lionel Gossman reappraises Moliere's comedy in the light of historical experience and interprets it in terms of the conditions from which it emerged. He brings it into the mainstream of seventeenth-century French literature and shows that Moliere was concerned with the same things that concerned Descartes, Corneille, Racine, or Pascal. Five comedies (Amphitryon, Dom Juan, Le Misanthrope, Le Tartuffe, and George Dandin) are studied in the first part of the book. A number of basic structures are found to be common to all of them, and these give the author his point of departure for the second part of the book. In
Table of ContentsPreface
Chapter 1. Amphitryon
Chapter 2. Dom Juan
Chapter 3. Le Misanthrope
Chapter 4. Le Tartuffe
Chapter 5. George Dandin
Chapter 6. Molière in His Own Time
Chapter 7. After Molière
Index
