Talk - The Human and the Nonhuman in the Tragedies of Jean Racine

This talk explores how the plays of Jean Racine engage with early modern ideas about the natural world. It examines how natural phenomena in his tragedies reveal the entanglement of human emotion and action with unstable environmental forces, situating the plays within the climatic volatility of the seventeenth century. In doing so, it challenges the view of French neoclassicism as purely abstract and instead presents Racine’s drama as deeply connected to a fragile, interdependent environment.

Carrie Heusinkveld is a third-year PhD student in French literature at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on representations of the natural world in early modern French theatre and poetry, particularly the works of Racine. She has presented at several scholarly societies and contributes to the forthcoming volume Racine's Late Greek Tragedies: Essays on 'Iphigénie' and 'Phèdre' (Brill, 2026).