Examining chameleonic identities as seen in theatrical performances and literary texts during the Romantic period, this study explores cultural attitudes toward imposture and how it reveals important and much-debated issues about this time period. Brewer shows chameleonism evoked anxieties about both social instability and British selfhood.

William D. Brewer's Staging Romantic Cha-meleons and Imposters proposes a broad definition of theatricality that moves from the stage to the page and from the world of fiction to real-life imposters. This book will interest not only scholars of the period's drama but also students of, say, Keatsian poetics or Byronic mobility. (Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 56 (4), Autumn, 2016)

Autorentext
William D. Brewer is Professor of English at Appalachian State University, USA.

Inhalt
Introduction 1. The Case of the Pretended Duke of Ormond 2. Richard Cumberland's Imposters 3. Thomas Holcroft's Politicized Imposter and Sycophantic Chameleon 4. Fluid Identities in Hannah Cowley's Universal Masquerade 5. Mary Robinson's Polygraphs 6. James Kenney's Opportunistic, Reformative, and Imitative Chameleons Epilogue: The Perkin Warbeck Debate