Squatters, vampires, and personalities: staging narration in the late nineteenth century

"Squatters, Vampires, and Personalities" argues that modern drama emerged through convergences of multiple genres, narration, and dramatic form during the late nineteenth century. My dissertation is a work of historical formalism that shows how formal elements combine with the conditions of theatrical production and publication to produce new forms of drama. Recent scholarship across literary studies has returned to considerations of form inflected by the lessons of historicism and various forms of literary theory, but this ―formalist turn‖ has not yet spurred reconsideration of the overarching narratives of dramatic development. My work on George Eliot, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Oscar Wilde uses genre as a historically specific way of studying form and supplies a new understanding of dramatic modernism‘s engagement with interiority and epic. I argue that modern drama demands an intergeneric critical approach; thus, I juxtapose drama with narrative fiction and criticism from the Victorian and modernist canon. The generic shifts of Eliot‘s The Mill on the Floss (1860), for example, set up a relationship between interiority, narration, dramatic form, and external circumstances against which I position the narrator types—squatters, vampires, and personalities—that structure my dissertation. I call Ibsen‘s characters squatters because they illegitimately occupy other people‘s homes (the domestic interiors on the stage) by rhetorically inserting themselves into the past lives of present residents. The play and novel characters that Strindberg calls vampires also attempt to control the environments they inhabit through performative narration, draining people, households, and linguistic conventions of vitality and meaning in the process. In Wilde‘s plays, fiction, and essays, this movement across formal and social conventions is embodied in narrator, critic, and dandy characters through which Wilde articulates and performs the project of ―realizing personality‖—a paradoxical quest for a self that constructs people out of (and in resistance to) artistic genres. Thus, my dissertation moves from a novelistic character who approaches the world-altering powers of a narrator, to stage characters who narrate, to characters who are produced by onstage narration. Through these characters‘ relationships to language and the material stage my dissertation yields a new history of dramatic form.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Sarah Balki