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

----- 自我探索：在第十八世纪的小说假面舞会和旅行。防守，斯莫利特，斯特恩”:卷42

ISBN: 9789042038899 出版年：2014 页码：223 Jakub Lipski Brill

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 literature during the period. Here it emerges as a dominant trope governing the poetics and the ideological dimensions of selected eighteenth-century novels by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne. Throughout, the book demonstrates that the travelling protagonists of the novels, metaphorically speaking, take part in the ‘masquerade of the world’, finding themselves in quest of their own selves and struggling to determine who they really are.