How novels act: The dramaturgy of nineteenth-century American fiction

How Novels Act: The Dramaturgy of Nineteenth-Century American Fiction traces the ways that distinctive features of nineteenth-century theater allowed novelists to examine the distinctive dynamics of mid-century political power. In particular, this project examines a set a novelistic characters in light of certain stage figures from which they are drawn: anonymous stage supernumeraries, star actors, stigmatized actresses, and blackface minstrel performers. My main argument is that novelists such as Melville, Hawthorne, Stowe, Fern, and Bird, borrowed from the popular theater culture of their day in order to interrogate the shifting social and political climate of the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. Beyond showing the extent to which these novelists engaged with the popular culture of their day, I also analyze the ways these novelists used the theatrical to explore the limits and possibilities of cross-cultural identification and empathy in an era of Jacksonian democracy. Drawing on scholarship in literary studies, theater history, and performance studies, How Novels Act further argues that nineteenth-century theater was uniquely capable of giving novelists a language to re-examine a politics of citizenship by underscoring social sympathy. Throughout my close readings of such figures as Ishmael, Sheppard Lee, Simon Legree, Hester Prynne, Ruth Hall, Black Guinea, and Fleece, I develop three terms to help me interrogate this politics of citizenship based on intersubjectivity: Theatrical watchfulness borrows from the Puritan practice of watchful self-reflection; I show that what was in the 17 th century a moral practice, appears in the 19th century as a social practice—one that emerges as a means of holding an increasingly diverse population together by encouraging each individual to watch her own behavior as if her life were on display. The prosopopoetic imagination builds on the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia—in which one confers the mask and speaks as if he were another person—and helps me navigate the trajectories of identification and empathy, especially in my analysis of blackface minstrelsy. Finally, theatrical citizenship is the term I use to describe the cluster of strategies, borrowed from mid-century theater culture, that nineteenth-century fictional characters deploy in order to negotiate the terrain of Jacksonian-era politics