This book is about the ways in which rhyme in French verse produces shapes or interferes with meaning - a topic which, despite its centrality, has hitherto received little critical attention. Part 1 examines those features which are peculiar to French rhyme - the different degrees of rhyme, rhyme gender, the frequency of rhymes on suffixes and endings - and explores the contributions they make to a poem's structure and semantic productivity. Its concern is twofold: to test the adequacy of the current methods of classifying rhymes and to demonstrate how comprehensive interpretations of a poem can be constructed from its rhyme-data. But wider issues are also confronted, including the relationships between rhyme and textuality, between rhyme and truth, between rhyme and rhythm. Part 2 analyses specific plays, poems and collections of poems: Racine's Mithridate, Moliere's Les Femmes Savantes, Voltaire's Poeme sur le Désastre de Lisbonne, Verlaine's Fêtes galantes and Aragon's Les Yeux d'Elsa.

"Scott provokes considerable rethinking on topics of intense interest to anyone working on French poetry and I am sincerely grateful." - Nineteenth-Century French Studies