Pratima Prasad

Susan McCready

The essays in Novel Stages examine the myriad intersections between drama and the novel in nineteenth-century France, a period when the two genres were in constant engagement with one another. The collection is unified by common intellectual concerns: the inscription of theatrical esthetics within the novel; the common practice among nineteenth-century novelists of adapting their works for the stage; and the novel's engagement with popular forms of theater. The essays provide insight into a specific aspect of the relationship between the theater and the novel in the nineteenth century. Their distinct perspectives form an overview of the literary landscape of nineteenth-century France, and demonstrate many ways in which all major nineteenth-century French novelists, including Hugo, Flaubert, Sand, and Zola, participated in the theatrical culture of their century.

Drama and the Novel in Nineteenth-century France

Novel Stages

This volume analyzes major French plays of the 1830s, focusing on their theatricality, and on the ways in which they expose the workings of the theater rather than conceal them. Through an examination of performance within these plays, the study posits that the stage is a privileged site of demonstration, a literal "proving ground" that lends a physical reality to abstract values announced in the text and shared or questioned by the audience. Negotiating between the literary study of drama and performance theory, this work breaks new ground in nineteenth-century theater scholarship while proposing a fresh direction in the study of text and performance. The Limits of Performance challenges conventional wisdom, offering a novel take on the mal du siècle, that thematic hardy perennial of French Romanticism and the nineteenth century in general, combined with eminently readable and, therefore, compelling analysis of plays - a thought-provoking addition to work in the field (Glyn Hambrook, Modern and Contemporary France, November 2008).

Susan McCready

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