Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows a close reading of some of the most important modern novels, that such novels document a contemporary awareness about theatricalisation in their own world and lives. It offers a flashback to the novels of Rabelais, the single most important antecedents of Don Quixote, associated again with particularly significant liminal time and place: the fairs of Lyon, in between Italy and Western Europe, at the collapse of the Renaissance and the rise of Protestantism. The book takes the storyline to England in the early 18th century, which did not produce a novel or a novelist comparable in analytical depth or prophetic vision to Don Quixote or Rabelais. It presents the main figures of the German Romantic misreading of Goethe, Jean-Paul and Tieck, and their instrumentality, through the deeply problematic mediation of Mme de Staël, in transplanting this misconstrued Goethe to France.