Title: Character's theater
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.
Subjects: Characters and characteristics in literature, English drama, Group identity in literature, History, History and criticism, Identity (Psychology) in literature, Literary form, English drama, history and criticism, 18th century
Time periods: 18th century