The Novel Stage : Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen / Marcie Frank.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Frank, Marcie, author.

Series:

Transits (Bucknell University)

Transits : literature, thought & culture, 1650-1850

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Theory, etc.

English drama--18th century--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

English drama.

English literature--18th century--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

English literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Bucknell University Press

Lewisburg, Pennsylvania : Bucknell University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

"The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen traces the novel's relation to the theater over the course of the long eighteenth century, arguing that the familiar account of the novel as 'new' and distinct from other literary genres risks distorting a true reckoning of the form by failing to engage with the borrowings and departures from other more familiar genres, particularly drama. The Novel Stage traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel. These genres were shared across print and performance, media that were not construed as opposites in a world in which individual silent reading took place beside playgoing, play-reading, amateur theatricals, and sociable reading aloud. The book thus expands an overly narrow conception of the novel as the genre of realism or domesticity whose highest achievement is its representation of characters' mental lives by describing the influence of the stage and its genres. Beginning in the later 1600s with Aphra Behn, The Novel Stage concludes with a chapter on some novelists of the Romantic period and a coda about Victorian novels. The Novel Stage's account of the novel provides an enriched, because more specific, sense of its formal accomplishments that drew on this ensemble of cultural forms and turns that lens back onto drama"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction

Genre, media, and the theory of the novel

The reform of the rake from Rochester to Inchbald

Performing reading in Richardson and Fielding

The promise of embarrassment : Frances Burney's theater of shame

Melodrama in Inchbald and Austen

Coda : the melodramatic address.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [199]-213) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-68448-169-4

1-68448-171-6

OCLC:

1155976044