Bibliography

 

Braverman, Richard. Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730.

Castle, Terry. "Masquerade and Allegory: Fielding's Amelia." Critical Essays on Henry Fielding. Ed. Albert J. Rivera. NY: G.K. Hall, 1998. 164-194.

------. Masquerade and Civilization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986. The classic text on eighteenth century masquerade, this book puts forth the key idea that masquerade enabled self-meditation, some freedom particularly for women, and a general state of "anti-decorum". Castle finds that while satirists claimed that the social practice of masquerade at Londo balls created a state of anti-decorum, several authors of satire such as Dryden and Fielding incorporate masquerade into their literary texts as a device to suggest larger themes such as pleasure, sex, and the unknown, something both pernicious and delightful.

Craft, Catherine A. "Reworking Male Models: Aphra Behn's Fair Vow-Breaker, Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, and Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote. Modern Language Review 96 (1991): 821-38. (Same author as the following.)

Craft-Fairchild, Catherine. Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Identity in Eighteenth Century Fictions by Women. Pennysylvania: Penn State UP, 1993. Claims that while the eighteenth century masquerade, used as a literary device, can sometimes enable women to behave more freely, as Castle claims, it also must conform to dominant culture and often causes women in masquerade to be objectified and fetishized by men. Craft finds that many eighteenth century female-authored texts, such as Aphra Behn's The Dumb Virgin and Mary Davys's The Accomplished Rake, contain both the subversive and the suppressive aspects of masquerade.

Cullers, Chris. "Mrs. Robinson and the Masquerade of Womanliness." Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century. Eds. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea Von Mucke. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. Explores cross-dressing in Mary Robinson's 1796 novel, Walsingham, Or, The Pupil of Nature. In this novel, the main character, a female, is raised as a male until she falls in love with a man and reveals her physical gender. Cullers argues that the novel does not see the main character's gender masquerade as a crime against nature, but simply an unsustainable facade.

Martha Hartenstein's article on masquerade in the Restoration compares it to the seventeenth century masque (a position counter to Castle's).

Macleod, Dianne Sachko. "Cross-cultural cross-dressing: Class, Gender, and Modernist Sexual Identity." Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture. Ed. Julie Codell and Dianne Sachko Macleod. England and Vermont: Ashgate, 1998.

Snader, Joe. "The Masquerade of Colonial Identity in Frances Brooke's Emily Montague (1769)." The Clothes That Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth Century Culture. Eds. Jessica Munns and Penny Richards. Newark: Delaware UP, 1999. 119-142.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon Schuster, 1995. Examines the types and avenues of disguise on the internet, including avatars, chatrooms, and multi-user dungeons or domains (MUDs). Taking a psychoanalytic approach to disguise as a means of exploring the self in a postmodern world, Turkle examines the multiple and frequently trans-gendered selves that internet users create, and asks whether these selves help us understand the multiplicity of identity, as well as whether the words that form the basis of internet interaction constitute virtual deeds, such as "tinysex" and "netrape". A useful book, full of case studies, and particularly strong at connecting aspects of postmodernism (Jameson's "depthlessness") to the internet.

Ty, Eleanor. "Freke in Men's Clothes: Transgression and the Carnivalesque in Edgeworth's Belinda." The Clothes That Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth Century Culture. Eds. Jessica Munns and Penny Richards. Newark: Delaware UP, 1999. 157-173. Ty argues that by wearing shocking clothing, Harriot Freke and Lady Delacour defy social rules of ceremony and place. The article usefully if briefly explores how crossdressing characters elicit others' fears.