The novel stage : narrative form from the Restoration to Jane Austen /

"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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Frank, Marcie (Author)
Published: Bucknell University Press,
Publisher Address: Lewisburg, Pennsylvania :
Publication Dates: [2020]
Literature type: Book
Language: English
Series: Transits : literature, thought & culture, 1650-1850
Subjects:
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"--
Carrier Form: 218 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-213) and index.
ISBN: 9781684481675 (paperback) :
1684481678 (paperback)
9781684481682 (hardcover)
1684481686 (hardcover)
9781684481712 (electronic book)
1684481716 (electronic book)
9781684481699 (electronic book)
1684481694 (electronic book)
Index Number: PR441
CLC: I561.064
Call Number: I561.064/F828
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.