The Novel Stage

Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen

Marcie Frank

2020
224 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781684481675
Transits

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 Story tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage.

Order here

Review

"Frank's readings are startlingly original in their portrayal of the novel's dramatic workings and deliver on the book's promise of a paradigm shift in the definition of the novel genre."
- Aphra Behn Online, Winter 2022

"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, Fall 2021

"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. Frank (Concordia Univ.) convincingly presents the 'reformed rake' plot of the early-18th-century stage as precursor to the fiction of Samuel Richardson. She demonstrates, just as convincingly, that Henry Fielding's skeptical response to Richardson employs a theatricality of its own."
- CHOICE, July 2020, Vol. 57, No. 11

About the author:

Marcie Frank is a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism from Dryden to Manley and How to be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal, and co-editor with Jonathan Goldberg and Karen Newman of This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $120.00, 978-1-6844-8168-2; EPUB: $34.95, 978-1-6844-8169-9