In her paper, “Reading the Reform of the Rake,” Marcie Frank examined the contributions Sir John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s death-bed conversion made to English literature. Surveying three dramatic treatments of the reform of the rake to virtue spanning the 18th she identified the innovations they use to demonstrate authentic conversion on stage, each of which produces instabilities that call forth audience participation for their resolution. The paper thus reveals the relations these scenes forge between ethics and aesthetics, and explores whether and how such staged representations of reform affected, or were affected by, the emergence of the novel. century by Colley Cibber, Sir John Vanbrugh and Elizabeth Inchbald,
Professor Marcie Frank’s full profile is available here as posted on the Concordia University website.
