Analysant les techniques littéraires utilisées par quatre écrivains anglais de la fin du XVIIe siècle, Aphra Behn, Manley Delarivier, William Congreve et Henry Fielding, l'enseignante s'oppose à l'affirmation selon laquelle le réalisme serait la clé du succès littéraire et elle étudie parallèlement la distinction entre l'art dramatique et la fiction romanesque. ©Electre 2025
Ever since Ian Watt's The Rise off the novel (1957), many critics have argued that a constitutive element of the early « novel » is its embrace of realism. Anne F. Widmayer contends, however, that Restoration and early eighteenth-century prose narratives employ techniques that distance the reacling audience from an illusion of reality ; irony, hypocrisy, and characters vvho are knowingly acting for an audience are privileged, highlighting the artificial and false in fictional works.
Focusing on the works of four celebraled playwright-novelists, Widmayer explores how the increased interiority of their prose characters is ridiculed by the use of techniques drawn from the theatre to throw into doubt the novel's ability to portray an unmediated « reality ». Aphra Behn's draimatic techniques question the reliability of female narrators, while Delarivier Manley undermines the impact of women's passionate anger by suggesting the self-consciousness of their performances. In his later drama, William Congreve subverts the character of the apparently objective critic that is recurrent in his prose work, whilst Henry Fielding uses the figure of the satirical writer in his rehearsal plays to mock the novelist's aspiration to conlrol the way a reader reads the text. Through analysing how these writers satirize the reading public's desire for clear distinctions between truth and illusion, Anne F. Widmayer also highlights the equally fluid boundaries between prose fiction and drama.
Paru le : 22/07/2015
Thématique : Essais et théories - Dictionnaire
Auteur(s) : Auteur : Anne F. Widmayer
Éditeur(s) :
Voltaire Foundation
Collection(s) : Oxford university studies in the Enlightenment
Série(s) : Non précisé.
ISBN : 978-0-7294-1165-3
EAN13 : 9780729411653
Reliure : Broché
Pages : XII-263
Hauteur: 24.0 cm / Largeur 16.0 cm
Poids: 0 g
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