Jen, Christina. Reading as acting: the novel's casting call and readerly performance in the British nineteenth century. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-erzy-kv91
DescriptionSituating nineteenth-century texts within the frameworks of underexplored theories and contexts of theater and performance, this dissertation argues that the activity of reading was understood in British nineteenth-century culture to be a preparatory stage in the acting process. Reading as Acting unfolds by drawing attention to figures of reading—characters, scenes of reading, readerly address—and analyzing the extent to which these moments in novels and performances prepare readers for theatrical show and social action. In this argument, texts function as acting manuals, dramatic props, and reading scripts that invite readers, especially female readers, to audition for conventional roles as well as alternative identities of feminist potential or social possibility. On the level of style, devices like free indirect discourse and parenthetical interruptions likewise configure the implied reader as character and actor, creating opportunities for readerly performance. Representations of reading in this argument not only demonstrate an important stage in the theatrical process of trying on roles, but they also respond to nineteenth-century anxieties about text-body correspondences, as well as to inconsistent notions of respectability positing blurry boundaries between reading and acting.