Eighteenth-century authorship and the play of fiction : novels and the theater, Haywood to Austen
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Eighteenth-century authorship and the play of fiction : novels and the theater, Haywood to Austen
(Routledge studies in eighteenth-century literature, 7)
Routledge, 2011, c2009
- : pbk
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This study looks at developments in eighteenth-century drama that influenced the rise of the novel; it begins by asking why women writers of this period experimented so frequently with both novels and plays. Here, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen explore theatrical frames--from the playhouse, to the social conventions of masquerade, to the fictional frame of the novel itself-that encourage audiences to dismiss what they contain as feigned. Yet such frames also, as a result, create a safe space for self-expression. These authors explore such payoffs both within their work-through descriptions of heroines who disguise themselves to express themselves-and through it. Reading the act of authorship as itself a form of performance, Anderson contextualizes the convention of fictionality that accompanied the development of the novel; she notes that as the novel, like the theater of the earlier eighteenth century, came to highlight its fabricated nature, authors could use it as a covert yet cathartic space. Fiction for these authors, like theatrical performance for the actor, thus functions as an act of both disclosure and disguise-or finally presents self-expression as the ability to oscillate between the two, in "the play of fiction."
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: Introduction: Playing at Authorship
Chapter Two: Rehearsing Desire: Eliza Haywood's Self-Conscious Performance
Chapter Three: Forgetting the Self: Frances Burney and Staged Insensibility
Chapter Four: Acting as Herself: Elizabeth Inchbald and Mediated Feelings
Chapter Five: Pedagogical Performance: Maria Edgeworth's Didactic Approach to Fiction
Epilogue-Generic Revolutions: Mansfield Park and the "Womanly Style" of Fiction
Notes
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"