Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
Identifier
ETD_4166
PhysicalDescription
Form (authority = gmd)
electronic resource
InternetMediaType
application/pdf
InternetMediaType
text/xml
Extent
vi, 267 p.
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references
Note (type = statement of responsibility)
by Sarah Balkin
Abstract (type = abstract)
"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.
Subject
Name (authority = LC-NAF)
NamePart (type = personal)
Eliot, George, 1819-1880--Criticism and interpretation
Subject
Name (authority = LC-NAF)
NamePart (type = personal)
Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906--Criticism and interpretation
Subject
Name (authority = LC-NAF)
NamePart (type = personal)
Strindberg, August, 1849-1912--Criticism and interpretation
Subject
Name (authority = LC-NAF)
NamePart (type = personal)
Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900--Criticism and interpretation
Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
AssociatedObject
Type
License
Name
Author Agreement License
Detail
I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.