Caught in the act :: theatricality in the nineteenth-century English novel /

In Caught in the Act, Joseph Litvak reveals not only the surprising wealth of theatrical themes in the canonical nineteenth-century English novel, but also the complex and over-determined politics of this theatricality. Nineteenth-century fiction is typically understood as enshrining the bourgeois v...

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1. Verfasser: Litvak, Joseph
Format: Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992.
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Zusammenfassung:In Caught in the Act, Joseph Litvak reveals not only the surprising wealth of theatrical themes in the canonical nineteenth-century English novel, but also the complex and over-determined politics of this theatricality. Nineteenth-century fiction is typically understood as enshrining the bourgeois values of privacy, domesticity, subjectivity, and sincerity. But Litvak demonstrates that private experience in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Henry James is in fact a rigorous enactment of a public script that constructs normative gender and class identities. These novels also display extravagant theatrical forms like travesty, transvestism, charade, and carnival. The theatricality enforces social norms at the same time that it provides ways for novelists to resist them. Litvak thus challenges recent interpretations of the nineteenth-century novel as a disciplinary apparatus. His approach encourages a rethinking of the genre and its varied cultural contexts in all their instability and ambivalence. In addition to a new interpretation, this rethinking offers a new, more frankly theatrical approach to interpretation itself. Litvak argues that the theatricality of the nineteenth-century novel anticipates the late twentieth-century strategies of feminist and gay critical performance.
Beschreibung:1 online resource (xvii, 283 pages)
Bibliographie:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:9780520911376
0520911377
0585161232
9780585161235
9780520074521
0520074521
9780520074545
0520074548

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