Magnifying Glass
Search Loader

David Kurnick 
Empty Houses 
Theatrical Failure and the Novel

Support
Adobe DRM
Cover of David Kurnick: Empty Houses (ePUB)

According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. Empty Houses challenges this consensus by reexamining the genre’s development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly–the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin–writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies–this book argues that the genre’s inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, David Kurnick reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms.

Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, Kurnick shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. Investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers, he establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority. In the process he illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre’s discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution.

A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, Empty Houses provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.

€35.99
payment methods

About the author

David Kurnick is associate professor of English at Rutgers University.
Language English ● Format EPUB ● Pages 272 ● ISBN 9781400840090 ● File size 1.2 MB ● Publisher Princeton University Press ● City Princeton ● Country US ● Published 2011 ● Downloadable 24 months ● Currency EUR ● ID 2365787 ● Copy protection Adobe DRM
Requires a DRM capable ebook reader

More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor

20,695 Ebooks in this category