The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen by Marcie Frank

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen by Marcie Frank Alexandra G. Bennett THE NOVEL STAGE: NARRATIVE FORM FROM THE RESTORATION TO JANE AUSTEN, by Marcie Frank. Transits: Literature, Thought and Culture, 1650-1850. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020. 230 pp. $120.00 hardback; $34.95 paperback; $34.95 ebook. Though Marcie Frank's The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen came out in 2020, its subject matter certainly resonates at this moment, when theaters around the world have been forced to adapt their craft to new forms of media for over a year. As a drama specialist and a theater practitioner, I tend to assume that genres are inherently collaborative and intertwined and that influence is reciprocal and might be both innovative and hearken back to past ideas simultaneously; these threads are part of the warp and weft of my work. It therefore came as some surprise to me, I have to admit, when I understood that a common perspective posits dramatic and novelistic genres as not only distinct but opposed in fundamental ways, as if novels could not be performative nor plays consumed through print. As a counter to this mode of discourse, The Novel Stage works brilliantly, showing how dramatic genres such as tragicomedy, comedy of manners, and melodrama fundamentally affected the prose writings of figures such as Aphra Behn, the Earl of Rochester, [End Page 398] Elizabeth Inchbald, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen and how their prose works inherently affected audiences for theatrical genres over time. Not only does Frank explore the ways in which each writer portrayed aspects of theater performance in their works—such as the home performance of Inchbald's Lovers' Vows (1798) in Austen's Mansfield Park (1814)—she also carefully traces the overlapping elements of performance and publication in showing, for instance, how elements of stage action get turned into narrative description in Frances Burney's Evelina (1778). Given that many of the authors she discusses here wrote both plays and prose pieces of varying lengths, the intertwining of genres makes excellent sense, and Frank clearly shows how each form influenced the other during the course of the eighteenth century. Loud cheers and huzzahs are also due for Frank's insistence that none of these writers worked in isolation and that the integration of women's writings in reworkings of literary history gives important contextualization that separating "women's writing" into a subgroup might omit. The process of writing in any period is a tension between novelty and tradition, a process of saying "yes, and . . ." as the best improvisers do; indeed, one of the impressions from the book's argument is that the development of genre in this particular time period was one of both improvisation and careful connection so as to appeal to as wide an entertainment-seeking audience as possible. (This seems especially timely now, when the demand for entertainment sparks both innovation and rehashes of older popular material in the effort to drive more eyes to various media services.) Frank is fully aware of the wider implications of her re-examination of genre in the eighteenth century. Defamiliarizing the relationships between plays and novels not only as forms of writing but as aspects of media consumption enables her to question the idealized aesthetic autonomy that underpins some previous histories of the novel as "a fantasy deriving from a Hegelian aesthetics whose influence is still to be found in the prizing of objects whose form recapitulates their content" (p. 154). Instead, by showing some of the ways in which print and performance informed and fed the demand for one another through this time period, Frank opens up the discussion of literary history as one that is far more collaborative and dialectical than might previously have been posited in the transition from thinking of writing as "poetry" to the classification of "literature." As energizing as Frank's exploration of the interweaving of drama and novel is, it also implicitly emphasizes some of the remaining frameworks that underpin current literary studies, such as the time-bound silos of periodization. For instance, Behn's use of both dramatic and novelistic forms...