| Description |
1 online resource (xvii, 283 pages) |
| Physical Medium |
polychrome |
| Description |
text file |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
Infection of acting : theatricals and theatricality in Mansfield Park -- Governess as actress : the inscription of theatricality in Jane Eyre -- Scenes of writing, scenes of instruction : authority and subversion in Villette -- Dickens and sensationalism -- Poetry and theatricality in Daniel Deronda -- Making a scene : Henry James's theater of embarrassment -- Actress, monster, novelist : figuration and counterplot in The Tragic muse. |
| Summary |
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. |
| Local Note |
eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America |
| Subject |
English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.
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English fiction. |
| Chronological Term |
19th century |
| Subject |
Performing arts in literature.
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Performing arts in literature. |
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Theater in literature.
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Theater in literature. |
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Actors in literature.
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Actors in literature. |
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Acting in literature.
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Acting in literature. |
| Chronological Term |
1800 - 1899 |
| Genre/Form |
Electronic books.
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Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Other Form: |
Print version: Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the act. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992 0520074521 (DLC) 91010222 (OCoLC)23253052 |
| ISBN |
9780520911376 (electronic book) |
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0520911377 (electronic book) |
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0585161232 (electronic book) |
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9780585161235 (electronic book) |
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9780520074521 (alkaline paper) |
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0520074521 (alkaline paper) |
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9780520074545 (paperback ; alkaline paper) |
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0520074548 (paperback ; alkaline paper) |
|
0520074521 |
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0520074548 (paperback) |
|
