Empty houses : theatrical failure and the novel / David Kurnick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kurnick, David, 1972-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--History and criticism.

English fiction.

American fiction--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Fiction--Technique--History.

Fiction.

Drama--Technique--History.

Drama.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (267 p.)

Edition:

Core Textbook

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. Empty Houses challenges this consensus by reexamining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly--the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin--writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies--this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, David Kurnick reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, Kurnick shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. Investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers, he establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority. In the process he illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, Empty Houses provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

One: Acoustics in the Thackeray Theater

Two: George Eliot's Lot

Three: Henry James's Awkward Stage

Four: Joyce Unperformed

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613290687

9781283290685

1283290685

9781400840090

1400840090

OCLC:

757745550