Author: Campbell, Jill
Title: Natural Masques : Gender and Identity in Fielding's Plays and Novels
Description: Stanford [CA], Stanford University Press, 1995. orig.cloth, dustwrapper.. 22x14cm, xii,324 pp.. Minor rubbing. Side page-edges spotted & stained. Good. ¶ Examining Fielding's sustained, often ambivalent engagement with questions of gender, Natural Masques breaks with critical conventions that contrast Fielding's robust 'masculinity' with Richardson's 'feminine' sensibilities. Arguing that a preoccupation with the tenuousness of gendered identity appears throughout Fielding's writings and that Fielding shared that preoccupation with his contemporaries, this book analyses Fielding's major works in connection with a variety of related texts - from satires on the castrati to educational treatises, Whig propaganda, and debates in political theory. Campbell shows how throughout Fielding's writings, the suspicion that sexual roles are merely assumed - and therefore subject to alteration and appropriation - intimates the possibility that personal identity is always impersonated, incoherent, mutable" - Publisher's description.

Keywords: Literary Criticism, English Literature, Henry Fielding, Gender Identity, Masculinity, Femininity, Sex Role Psychology, ,