Description
Book Synopsis2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Marcie Frank’s study traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a dramatic new approach to the history of the English novel that examines how the collaboration of genres contributed to the novel’s narrative form and to the modern organization of literature. Drawing on media theory and focusing on the less-examined narrative contributions of such authors as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, alongside those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, The Novel Stage tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Trade Review“This interesting study explores the ways in which novels borrow from and develop theatrical conventions and forms during the eighteenth century. Examining a spectrum of practices, Frank explores the complex relationships between genre and form and offers new insights into the relationship between eighteenth-century theatre and literature.”— Helen Brooks, author of Actresses, Gender and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women
“
The Novel Stage is an engaging and provocative text; its major insights about the key role of the repertory in eighteenth-century reading habits and the collaborations between theatre and fiction are bracing and of wide-ranging use.” — Manushug Powell, author of Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals
"Frank’s emphasis on generic and media fluidity and interrogation of fixed mindsets around them are, to use one of the words she unpacks in Burney’s novels, provocative; I can certainly see why
The Novel Stage was named a 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title....Frank’s work is excellent at pointing towards new, interdisciplinary approaches to important discussions of genre and form."— Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature
"An important and long-overdue consideration of the relationship between the theater and the novel in the long 18th century,
The Novel Stage treats major Restoration and 18th-century dramatic forms—tragicomedy, comedy of manners, and melodrama—as they abandon the stage to take up residence in prose fiction. Essential."— Choice
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Preface: The Novel Stage
Chapter 1: Genre, Media, and the Theory of the Novel
Chapter 2: The Reform of the Rake from Rochester to Inchbald
Chapter 3: Performing Reading in Richardson and Fielding
Chapter 4: The Promise of Embarrassment: Frances Burney’s Theater of Shame
Chapter 5: Melodrama in Inchbald and Austen
Coda: The Melodramatic Address
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
