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As theatres expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the distance between actor and audience became a telling metaphor for the distance emerging between writers and readers. Nuss explores the ways in which theatre helped authors imagine connecting with a new mass audience.

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Introduction: Impossible Theaters 1. Pantomime: Killing the Drama in Order to Save It 2. Spaces with Meaning: Crossing from Stage to Closet in Byron and Inchbald 3. Man Seeing: Wordsworth and the Theatrical Voice 4. ´The Great Master Of Ideal Mimicry": Shelley s Struggle With The Actor 5. Creative Spectacle: Hunt, Hazlitt, De Quincey Conclusion: Reaching a Mass Audience Face to Face

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´In this taut little book, Nuss examines the ways that literary figures experimented with theatre forms and techniques as public theatres proliferated from the 18th into 19th century . . . This solid study will interest advanced students and scholars exploring the nexus of performance and literature. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.´ - CHOICE

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Melynda Nuss is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Texas-Pan American, USA.

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