| How might a person maintain control over his or her self-representations when the whole world seems to be watching? My dissertation seeks to answer this question by examining the autobiographical performances---performances conducted onstage and off, in print and in person---of England's first modern celebrities. Moving beyond recent studies that describe the celebrity as a passive product of his or her society, I argue that celebrities in eighteenth-century England developed a literary style that enabled them to display their bodies and their identities on the stage, on the page, and on the street without subjecting those identities to the public's anatomizing gaze. They did so not by concealing but rather by exaggerating their self-representations until these representations could no longer be interpreted or interpolated according to the eighteenth century's grammar of behavior. My term for this literary and performance style is "over-expression." Exemplified by the black page of Laurence Sterne's pseudo-autobiography, Tristram Shandy ---a page that obscures the identity of Sterne's self-referential parson Yorick through its very excess of ink---over-expression allowed its celebrity-authors to create the effect of self-revelation without exposing themselves to public censure. My dissertation discovers instances of over-expression and mines its implications in the printed autobiographies, the self-referential plays and novels, and the puffs, prologues, and public appearances of eighteenth-century England's biggest stars.;Tracing a genealogy between the work of performers who recreated themselves as authors (Colley Cibber, Charlotte Charke, David Garrick, George Anne Bellamy, and Mary Robinson) and the work of authors who staged their lives as addenda to their fictions (Alexander Pope and Laurence Sterne), "Over-Expressing the Self" thus intervenes in the debates about the making of the modern self that have long dominated eighteenth-century studies. But it expands the terms of this debate by challenging the disciplinary boundaries that have traditionally separated studies of the novel from studies of the drama or that have considered performance theory as applicable only to twentieth- and twenty-first-century works. By combining close-readings of autobiographical texts th performance-based investigations of the props, costumes, casting choices, and reviews that surrounded these texts, I recreate and analyze not only the literature but also the mythology surrounding each celebrity. To combine the methodologies of performance and literary studies in an examination of eighteenth-century celebrity is not only to discover new intersections between novelistic and theatrical depictions of character; it is also to realize that England's first secular autobiographers were as bent on unmaking as they were on making the modern self. |
