Audience participation: Novelistic representations of the theater in American literature from the 1890s to the 1930s (Theodore Dreiser, Thornton Wilder, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Nathanael West, Gertrude Stein) [electronic resource]
說明
162 p
附註
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-04, Section: A, page: 1357
Director: Jane F. Thrailkill
Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005
This dissertation argues that American novelists from the 1890s to the 1930s used depictions of the theater to voice anxieties about their own genre's relationship with its audience. Novelists frequently wrote about theater audiences as they sought to define the novel and novel audiences. In Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser reflects societal concerns that the theater allows classes and genders to mix, homogenizing the audience and threatening individual responses to artistic productions, which are central to the novel. Henry James also depicts a culture that promotes mass experience at the expense of individuality. In The Tragic Muse, he argues the theater can provoke thought, but in What Maisie Knew he guides his readers away from the theater. After the rise of the cinema, the theater came to be represented as a solution to, rather than an instigator of, the audience problem. In Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, John Dos Passos's The Big Money, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, and Nathanael West's Day of the Locusts, in the 1920s and 1930s, the new threat of the cinema changes novelistic depictions of the theater. The theater is portrayed as an old-fashioned genre that once enabled audience members to have individual, meaningful connections with the art they were experiencing. Like her predecessors, Gertrude Stein initially views audiences as problematic in Four in America. However, in The Geographical History of America, Stein redefines plays and contains the audience under the control of the novelist. Stein's late work resolves troubled relationship that earlier novelists had with their audiences and expressed through representations of the theater
