Theatrical Failure and the Novel
Buch, Englisch, 280 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 393 g
ISBN: 978-0-691-15316-2
Verlag: Princeton University Press
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.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
Weitere Infos & Material
Introduction Interiority and Its Discontents 1
Theater Demetaphorized 1
Theater Dethematized: Spatializations of the Novel 10
The Vocation of Failure 24
Chapter One: Acoustics in the Thackeray Theater 29
"The Play" 29
Trivializing History, or, Domesticity 33
Diminishing Returns: Vanity Fair?s Theatricality 42
The Box-Opener: A Note on Becky Sharp 50
Empty House Theatricals: The Wolves and the Lamb 53
In the Recess of Consciousness: Lovel the Widower 56
Chapter Two: George Eliot?s Lot 67
Theater and Abstraction 67
Romola, Felix Holt, and the Uses of Inwardness 74
The Spanish Gypsy?s Universal Theater 82
Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and the Cast of Mind 91
Chapter Three: Henry James?s Awkward Stage 105
Other Almost Anyhow 105
The Performance Imaginary: The Other House, 1896 113
The Performance Imaginary II: The Other House, 1909 121
In the Sociable Dusk of The Awkward Age 126
James and His Kind 136
What Does Jamesian Style Want? 144
Chapter Four: Joyce Unperformed 153
Joycean Exposures 153
Epiphany and the Obscene Body 158
Ibsen, Exiles, and the Scene of Sex 167
Backstage at the Library: "Scylla and Charybdis" 178
The Ineluctable Modality of the Legible: "Circe" 183
Epilogue In the Kingdom of Whomever: Baldwin?s
Method 192
Notes 207
Index 245
