In the Wake of Medea: Neoclassical Theater and the Arts of Destruction By Juliette Cherbuliez. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020; pp. xii + 249, 19 illustrations. $110 cloth, $32 paper, $31.99 e-book

In Chapter 4, “Flying toward Futurity: Spectacularity and Suspension,” which offers the most important contribution to the study of neoclassical theatre writ large, Cherbuliez makes a brilliant argument tying together early modern (or premodern, as she calls the period in question) notions of historical temporality with the mechanical practices of staging machine plays that gives striking insight into neoclassical cosmologies and their onstage representation. Most important, though, scholars of topics not referenced in the title or blurb will find their subjects explored at length in a single chapter: ekphrasis and intertextuality underscore problems of periodization in Chapter 2; the figure of Hercules and theories of stage presence are explored in the third chapter; neoclassical scene design and machine plays interweave with culturally specific approaches to temporality in the fourth; the fifth treats Racine's Athalie alongside the linguistic evolution of the term “catastrophe”; and a certain performative acceptance of the early modern notion of a unified historical plane, embraced throughout the book, comes through especially clearly in Chapters 2 and 4. [...]the book has a wider audience than that for which its publication format gives it credit, and potential readers should not take the promises of that format at face value.