Theatrical imaginings: Genre, character, and identity on the eighteenth-century English stage

This dissertation offers a fresh approach to eighteenth-century drama and provides a new understanding of the material. Using dramatic genre as its primary analytic structure, this dissertation explores the development of English character on the eighteenth-century stage. I first examine the discursive resonance of the term character in the eighteenth century to illustrate its paradigmatic status with respect to the representation and apprehension of identity. I argue that identity was understood quite specifically during this period as a contingent effect of character rather than of what we now call the subject. Each of the subsequent chapters locates that dynamic of contingency in a particular genre--plays about plays, tragedy, and comedy--and explores the distinctive influence of generic structure on the production and perception of identity. These discussions illustrate how different genres manipulated character markers such as class and gender. They contribute, in turn, to the dissertation\u27s larger argument that gender and class categories were consistently used on the eighteenth-century stage to mediate discussions of national identity