Description
TitleEnglish variety: popular theater and the post-consensus novel
Date Created2021
Other Date2021-10 (degree)
SubjectEnglish literature, Rushdie, Salman. Satanic verses, Carter, Angela, 1940-1992. Works. Selections, Waters, Sarah, 1966- Tipping the velvet, McEwan, Ian. Atonement, Great Britain -- Fiction
Extent1 online resource (vi, 214 pages)
DescriptionEnglish Variety sets out to explain the late–twentieth-century English’s novel’s interest in a series of performance genres native to an archaic tradition of popular theatrical entertainment. It does so by reading what I call “the novel of variety” in the context of both a renewed critical interest in English national culture, and an urgently felt need to reassess the possibility of postimperial collectivity marked by racial, ethnic, sexual, and cultural difference. As I understand it, the novel’s belated uptake of popular theatrical genres like pantomime, comic monologue, and male impersonation represents a form of generic dynamism that mirrors the social dynamism of popular theatrical enterprise, that is, by simulating the theater’s defining attributes: its variousness, its vulgarity, its topicality, and so forth. Moreover, the novelists at the center of this project—Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Sarah Waters, and Ian McEwan—recognize that the theater, unlike the novel, depends upon embodiment, co-presence, and collective enterprise; as such, they strive to adapt the theater’s forms in order to dramatize more clearly the novel’s relationship to the social. In taking on the social and generic features of the popular theater, then, the contemporary novel performs its own commitment to vernacular, populist collectivity, a kind of collectivity that assembles around popular will rather than democratic protocol, and thus becomes a more capacious genre for organizing people and managing difference. In moving away from Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” as a primary marker of national culture in the novel, English Variety focuses on micropolitical scales in which the collectivity that thrives in spontaneous, even amateurish, entertainment genres substitutes for abstract notions of civic belonging. In short, theatrical variety expands the contemporary novel’s methods for representing the social, and, in the process, helps to diversify Englishness as a demographic category. To this end, I suggest we make space for “the novel of variety” in our critical histories of the late-century British novel.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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