In Quest of the Self: Masquerade and Travel in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne

In recent decades the masquerade has enjoyed a revival in literary and cultural studies. It has been seen as a symptom of the irrational trends permeating the Age of Reason and as a sign of the instability, arbitrariness as well as non-essentiality of personal identity; notions testifying to affinities between the eighteenth century and our own time. In Quest of the Self offers a new consideration not only of the masquerade as such, but also of the ways in which it was transposed into liter...