ABOUT THIS BOOK

2020 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

"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

"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

"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

“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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List 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