Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, English Drama - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Great Britain - Theater - History & Criticism

Private Theatricals

Name: Private Theatricals
Author: Auerbach
ISBN: 9780674707559

by Auerbach

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Overview

"Everyman" as actor on life's stage has been a recurrent theme in popular literature—epecially persuasive in these times of powerful electronic media, celebrity hype, and professional image-makers—but the great Victorians exuded sincerity. Nina Auerbach reminds us that all lives can be subversive performances. Charting the notable impact of the theater and theatricality on the Victorian imagination, she provocatively reexamines the concept of sincerity and authenticity as literary ideal.

In novels, popular fiction, and biographies, Auerbach unveils the theatrical element in lives imagined and represented. Focusing on three major points in the life cycle—childhood, passage to maturity, and death—she demonstrates how the process of living was for Victorians the acting of a role; only dying generated a creature with an "own self." Her discussion draws not only on theater history, but on demonology-the ghosts and monsters so much a part of the nineteenth-century imagination.

Nina Auerbach has written a closely reasoned and stimulating book for everyone interested in the Victorian age, and everyone interested in theatricality—-whether private or on the stage.

About the Author, Auerbach

Nina Auerbach is Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.

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Editorials

Library Journal

There's a lot, maybe too much, going on in this short monograph. Auerbach's book probes the significance of ``theatricality''--role assumption, gesture, etc.--in Victorian literature and biography. The thesis revolves around the life-cycle (and beyond--ghosts are examined, too) as signifier, as a value-system replacing those (religion, science) ``lost'' to the Victorians. If this sounds like a complicated mix, it is; the book moves quickly from point to point, text to text, and readers will want to be widely read in the Victorians. There is no attempt to lure the uninitiated, and this extends to a rather monotonous authorial voice. Specialists, however, will find some items of interest and occasionally a real insight (e.g., a gloss on Victorian and modern attitudes toward the undead). For subject collections.-- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.