"Distance, Theater and the Public Voice explores the ways in which theater helped authors imagine connecting with a new mass audience. As theaters expanded, the distance between actor and audience became a telling metaphor for the distance emerging between writers and readers. Distance, Theater and the Public Voice shows how writers experimented with theatrical situations--both old and new, legitimate and illegitimate--as they crafted a voice that could sound intimate and personal even as it broadcast itself to an imagined public"--