MARC 主機 00000nam 2200000 4500
001 AAI3170535
005 20060526065255.5
008 060526s2005 s eng d
020 0542067986
035 (UnM)AAI3170535
040 UnM|cUnM
100 1 Rosenbaum, Emily
245 10 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)
|h[electronic resource]
300 162 p
500 Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-
04, Section: A, page: 1357
500 Director: Jane F. Thrailkill
502 Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, 2005
520 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
590 School code: 0153
650 4 Literature, American
650 4 American Studies
690 0591
690 0323
710 20 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
773 0 |tDissertation Abstracts International|g66-04A
856 40 |uhttp://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/
advanced?query=3170535
912 PQDT
