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Character's Theater - Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Hardcover)
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Character's Theater - Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Hardcover)
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Character's Theater Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century
English Stage Lisa A. Freeman "A well-researched book, which draws
on some interesting and lesser-known plays, such as those by
neglected female playwrights."--"Times Literary Supplement" "Lisa
Freeman's excellent cultural analysis . . . demonstrates that
character is a contested site in England's attempt to negotiate a
changing sociology of class, gender, and nation even as it retained
fundamental forms of patriarchy. . . . This is perhaps the most
important new book on eighteenth-century theater."--"Albion" If the
whole world acted the player, how did the player act the world? In
"Character's Theater," Lisa A. Freeman uses this question to test
recent critical discussion of eighteenth-century literature and
culture. Much current work, she observes, focuses on the concept of
theatricality as both the governing metaphor of social life and a
primary filter of psychic perception. Hume's "theater of the mind,"
Adam Smith's "impartial spectator," and Diderot's "tableaux" are
all invoked by theorists to describe a process whereby the private
individual comes to internalize theatrical logic and apprehend the
self as other. To them theatricality is a critical mechanism of
modern subjectivity but one that needs to be concealed if the
subject's stability is to be maintained. Finding that much of this
discussion about the "Age of the Spectator" has been conducted
without reference to the play texts or actual theatrical practice,
Freeman turns to drama and discovers a dynamic model of identity
based on eighteenth-century conceptualizations of character. In
contrast to the novel, which cultivated psychological tensions
between private interiority and public show, dramatic characters in
the eighteenth century experienced no private thoughts. The theater
of the eighteenth century was not a theater of absorption but
rather a theater of interaction, where what was monitored was not
the depth of character, as in the novel, but the arc of a genre
over the course of a series of discontinuous acts. In a
genre-by-genre analysis of plays about plays, tragedy, comedies of
manners, humours, and intrigue, and sentimental comedy, Freeman
offers an interpretive account of eighteenth-century drama and its
cultural work and demonstrates that by deploying an alternative
model of identity, theater marked a site of resistance to the rise
of the subject and to the ideological conformity enforced through
that identity formation. Lisa A. Freeman teaches English at
University of Illinois at Chicago. 2001 312 pages 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 8
illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3639-2 Cloth $59.95s 39.00 World Rights
Literature Short copy: "Lisa Freeman's excellent cultural analysis
. . . demonstrates that character is a contested site in England's
attempt to negotiate a changing sociology of class, gender, and
nation even as it retained fundamental forms of
patriarchy."--"Albion"
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