After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance

by John Glavin

Overview

John Glavin offers both a performative reading of Dickens the novelist and an exploration of the potential for adaptive performance of the novels themselves. Through close study of text and context Glavin uncovers a richly ambivalent, often unexpectedly hostile, relationship between Dickens and the theater and theatricality of his own time, and shows how Dickens' novels can be seen as a form of counter performance. Yet Glavin also explores the performative potential in Dickens' fiction, and describes new ways to stage that fiction in emotionally powerful, critically acute adaptations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521633222
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/11/1999
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture , #20
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.67(d)
Lexile:	1200L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"...this is a title that serious students of Dickens need to read." Choice

"After Dickens is a self-consciously clever book that advocates "takings what we want rather than accepting what we are offered"..." Essays in Theatre

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

From the Publisher