Downing A. Thomas is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and co-editor of Empire and Occupation in France and the Francophone Worlds, a special issue of Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature (1999). He has also published numerous articles.

Review of the hardback: '… the attraction and usefulness of this work is that Thomas specifically avoids falling back on hackneyed texts and does not slavishly retrace other's steps through reams of over-analysed material.' Eighteenth-Century Music

• Introduction; Part I. French Opera in the Shadow of Tragedy: 1. Song as performance and the emergence of French opera; 2. The opera king; 3. The ascendance of music and the disintegration of the hero in Armide; 4. The disruption of poetics I: Medee's excessive voice; 5. The disruption of poetics II: Hippolyte et Aricie and the reinvention of tragedy; Part II: Opera and Enlightenment: From Private Sensation to Public Feeling: 6. Heart strings; 7. Music, sympathy, and identification at the Opéra-Comique; 8. Architectural visions of lyric theater and spectatorship; 9. Opera and common sense: Lacépède's Poetique de la musique; Conclusions; Works Cited; Index.

Downing A. Thomas is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and co-editor of Empire and Occupation in France and the Francophone Worlds, a special issue of Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature (1999). He has also published numerous articles.

Review of the hardback: '… the attraction and usefulness of this work is that Thomas specifically avoids falling back on hackneyed texts and does not slavishly retrace other's steps through reams of over-analysed material.' Eighteenth-Century Music

• Introduction; Part I. French Opera in the Shadow of Tragedy: 1. Song as performance and the emergence of French opera; 2. The opera king; 3. The ascendance of music and the disintegration of the hero in Armide; 4. The disruption of poetics I: Medee's excessive voice; 5. The disruption of poetics II: Hippolyte et Aricie and the reinvention of tragedy; Part II: Opera and Enlightenment: From Private Sensation to Public Feeling: 6. Heart strings; 7. Music, sympathy, and identification at the Opéra-Comique; 8. Architectural visions of lyric theater and spectatorship; 9. Opera and common sense: Lacépède's Poetique de la musique; Conclusions; Works Cited; Index.