Identity and Ideology

The bourgeois drama of "serious genre" was one of the major innovative literary forms of the French Enlightenment, but it has been largely excluded from the canon today. In a study drawing on contemporary and 18th-century literary theory and philosophy, social history and history of the theatre, Hayes presents a reading of the dramas of Diderot and Sade and argues for a new understanding of the genre as a whole. A disparate group as they were, the "drame's" practitioners share a new approach to personal identity as relational and derived from the workings of the social network - a notion of great ideological shift in the period preceding 1789.