Character's theater
Subtitle: genre and identity on the eighteenth-century English stage
By: Lisa A. Freeman.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 298
Subjects: English drama -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Characters and characteristics in literature; Literary form -- History -- 18th century; Identity (Psychology) in literature; Group identity in literature
Description: "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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [275]-290) and index.