Böcker av Michael (Fellow and Tutor in French Hawcroft

The first book-length study of a much-debated group of characters in Moliere's plays, the so-called 'raisonneurs'. Examining them in detail in the most famous plays - L'Ecole des femmes, Le Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, Le Malade imaginaire - Hawcroft provides one of the best accounts available of the seventeenth-century French playwright whose comedies were so popular with the audiences of his time.

Explores the theatricality of Jean Racine's language and takes as its analytical tool two relatively neglected parts of rhetoric ("inventio" and "dispositio"), highlighting the dramatic excitement created by characters who constantly engage in verbal battle trying to dominate those around them.