After Dickens
Reading, Adaptation and Performance

A study of Dickens's hostility to theatre and theatricality alongside the huge performative potential of his fiction.

John Glavin (Author)

9780521032377, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 November 2006

244 pages
22.7 x 15.1 x 1.9 cm, 0.372 kg

"The entire study is a virtuoso critical and (play) writerly preformance...brilliant and entertaining." Victorian Studies, Summer 2001

After Dickens is both a performative reading of Dickens the novelist and an exploration of the potential for adaptive performance of the novels themselves. John Glavin conducts a historical inquiry into Dickens's relationship to the theatre and theatricality of his own time, and uncovers a much more ambivalent, often hostile, relationship than has hitherto been noticed. In this context, Dickens's novels can be seen as a form of counter-performance, one which would allow the author to perform without being seen or scrutinized. But Glavin also identifies a rich performative potential in Dickens's fiction, and describes new ways to stage that fiction in emotionally powerful, critically acute adaptations. The book as a whole, therefore, offers a reading of Dickens through an unusual alliance between literary criticism and theatrical performance.

Acknowledgments
Note on the text
Introduction
Part I. Set Up: 1. Dickens, adaptation and Grotowski
2. … as upon a theatre
Part II. Flashback: 3. … to be a Shakespeare
4. Exit: 'the sanguine mirage'
Part III. Resolution: 5. How to do it
6. Coda
Notes
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]