Theatre-fiction refers to novels and stories that focus on theatre - its people, practices and industries.[1] Characters often include actors, playwrights, directors, prompters, understudies, set designers, critics, or casting agents. Common settings may include theatre auditoriums, dressing rooms, rehearsal spaces, or other places in which theatre is created and performed. Theatre-fiction may engage with and represent many different varieties of theatre, from performances of Shakespearean tragedy to Kabuki theatre to pantomime.
Critics such as Lisa Jackson-Schebetta[2] and Stefano Boselli have discussed the value of theatre-fiction in contributing to our understanding of theatre's histories and medial complexities. As Boselli writes, "Since theatre tends to give more weight to the expressive sphere, often deliberately obscuring the real lives and troubles of the artists involved, one of the roles of theatre-fiction is to provide access not just to a backstage dimension that may chronologically overlap with the creative process or the performance itself but also to a broader historical awareness that embraces the multitude of agents, from living beings to material entities, that contribute to what is shown in front of the audience."[3]
References
edit- ^ Wolfe, Graham (2020). Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge. p. 2. ISBN 9781000124361.
- ^ Jackson-Schebetta, Lisa (2023). "Theatre-Fiction-History: The Personal and Professional Industry of Theatre in Rojas's El viaje entretenido". In Wolfe, Graham (ed.). The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction. Routledge. pp. 29–41. ISBN 9781032069906.
- ^ Boselli, Stefano (2023). "Echoes of Theatre Past: Blasco Ibañez's El comediante Fonseca and Cozarinsky's El rufián moldavo". In Wolfe, Graham (ed.). The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction. Routledge. pp. 54–66. ISBN 9781032069906.
Further reading
edit- Allen, Emily. Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003.
- Dickinson, Linzy Erika. Theatre in Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine. Amsterdam: Brill, 2000.
- Jouanny, Sylvie. L'actrice et ses doubles: figures et représentations de la femme de spectacle à la fin de XIXe siècle. Genève: Droz, 2002.
- Miller, Renata Kobetts. The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2020.
- Newark, Cormac. Opera in the Novel From Balzac to Proust. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.
- Russell, Gillian. “The Novel and the Stage.” Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 2, English and British Fiction 1750-1820, edited by Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 513–529.
- Wolfe, Graham. "Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal: Theatrical Fantasy and the Gaze." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 49.3 (2016): 91–108.
- Wolfe, Graham, editor. The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2023.
- Wolfe, Graham. "Theatrical Extraneity: John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Dickensian Theatre-Fiction." Dickens Quarterly 35.4 (2018): 350–372.
- Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. New York: Routledge, 2019.
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