Alienation (Vefremdung) is a concept inextricably linked with the name of twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht -- with modernism, the avant-garde and Marxist theory. However, as Phoebe von Held argues in this book, 'alienation' as a sociological and aesthetic notion avant la lettre had already surfaced in the thought of eighteenth-century French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot. This original study destabilizes the conventional understanding of alienation through a reading of Le Paradoxe sur le comEdien, Le Neveu de Rameau and other works by Diderot, opening up new ways of...