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In recent decades the masquerade has enjoyed a revival in literary and cultural studies. It has been seen as a symptom of the irrational trends permeating the Age of Reason and as a sign of the instability, arbitrariness as well as non-essentiality of personal identity; notions testifying to affinities between the eighteenth century and our own time.In Quest of the Self offers a new consideration not only of the masquerade as such, but also of the ways in which it was transposed into literature during the period. Here it emerges as a dominant trope governing the poetics and the ideological dimensions of selected eighteenth-century novels by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne. Throughout, the book demonstrates that the travelling protagonists of the novels, metaphorically speaking, take part in the â€˜masquerade of the worldâ€™, finding themselves in quest of their own selves and struggling to determine who they really are.