The bourgeois drama of "serious genre" was one of the major innovative literary forms of the French Enlightenment, but it has been largely excluded from the canon today. In a study drawing on contemporary and 18th-century literary theory and philosophy, social history and history of the theatre, Hayes presents a reading of the dramas of Diderot and Sade and argues for a new understanding of the genre as a whole. A disparate group as they were, the "drame's" practitioners share a new approach to personal identity as relational and derived from the workings of the social network - a notion of great ideological shift in the period preceding 1789.