The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature

This valuable study illuminates the idea of nobility as display as public performance in Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature and society. Ranging widely from Castiglione and French courtesy manuals through Montaigne and Bacon to the literature of the Grand Sicle David Posner examines the structures of public identity in the period. He focuses on the developing tensions between on the one hand literary or imaginative representations of ''nobility'' and on the other the increasingly problematic historical position of the nobility themselves. These tensions produce a transformation in the notion of the noble self as a performance and eventually doom court society and its theatrical mode of self-presentation. Situated at the intersection of rhetorical and historical theories of interpretation this book contributes significantly to our understanding of the role of literature both in analysing and in shaping social identity.