Novelists have long been attracted to theatre. Some have pursued success on the stage, but many have sought to combine these worlds, entering theatre through their fiction, setting stages on their novels’ pages, and casting actors, directors, and playwrights as their protagonists. The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction has convened an international community of scholars to explore the remarkable array of novelists from many eras and parts of the world who have created fiction from the stuff of theatre, asking what happens to theatre on the pages of novels, and what happens to novels when they collaborate with theatre. From J. W. Goethe to Louisa May Alcott, Mikhail Bulgakov, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Atwood, some of history’s most influential novelists have written theatre-fiction, and this Companion discusses many of these figures from new angles. But it also spotlights writers who have received less critical attention, such as Dorothy Leighton, Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, Ronald Firbank, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Li Yu, and Vicente Blasco Ibañez, bringing their work into conversation with a vital field. A valuable resource for students, scholars, and admirers of both theatre and novels, The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction offers a wealth of new perspectives on topics of increasing critical concern, including intermediality, theatricality, antitheatricality, mimesis, diegesis, and performativity.
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction: When Novels Turn to Theatre
Graham Wolfe
Curtain Raiser: The Comic Romance of Theatre and Novel
Graham Wolfe
Part I. Theatre-Fictional Histories and Hauntings
1. Theatre-Fiction-History: The Personal and Professional Industry of Theatre in Roja's El viaje entretenido
Lisa Jackson-Schebetta
2. "The Archive in the Fiction": A Look into the Interiority of Classical Theatre
Odai Johnson
3. Echoes of Theatre Past: Blasco Ibañez’s El comediante Fonseca and Cozarinsky’s El rufián moldavo
Stefano Boselli
4. Ghosting in James’s The Tragic Muse: The Haunted Body and the Haunted House
Sophie Stringfellow
5. The Stage Properties of Willa Cather’s Theatre-Fiction
Kevin Riordan
6. Spectral Effects: Dual Roles, Doubling, and Invisibility in Robertson Davies’s World of Wonders
Katrina Dunn
Part II. Theatre-Fiction, Form, and Style
7. Mishima Yukio’s "Onnagata" as a Shingeki Theatre-Fiction: "Amalgamation" of the Theatrical and the Literary in a Kabuki-World Tale
Maki Isaka
8. Elegy for a Lost World: Reading Syed Mustafa Siraj’s Mayamridanga as Theatre-Fiction
Tamalika Roy
9. "What Does it Matter—the Plot?": "Sapphic" and Theatrical Reading Strategies in Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory, Inclinations, and Caprice
John R. Severn
10. Theatre-Fiction in the Present Tense: Reflections on Temporality and the Other in Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed and Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal
Alexandra Ksenofontova
11. Method Acting, the Narrator, and the Figure of the Doppelganger in The Confessions of Edward Day
Roweena Yip
12. "No Curtains": Generic Divides and Ethical Connections in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Cara Hersh
13. Making a Scene: The Craft of Writing Theatre-Fiction
A Dialogue Between Mona Awad and Jessica Riley
Part III. Performing Selfhood and Authorship through Theatre-Fiction
14. Dorothy Leighton’s Disillusion and New Woman Experimentation
Renata Kobetts Miller
15. "I Sniff at a Red Artificial Geranium": Theatre, the Senses and the Self in Colette’s novel The Vagabond
William McEvoy
16. "A Real Actress": Theatre and Selfhood in Antonia White’s Frost in May Quartet
Frances Babbage
17. "Does it Have to be a Play?" Autofiction as Theatrical Failure in Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?
Chloe R. Green
18. Mikhail Bulgakov’s Black Snow: Getting First-Personal with Stanislavski
Graham Wolfe
Part IV. Theatre-Fiction and Young People
19. Playing and Scripting the Past while Imagining Futures in Charlotte Yonge’s 1864 Historical Dramas
Heather Fitzsimmons Frey
20. "A few Scenes of Humble Life": Theatre-making in the Novels of Louisa May Alcott
Karen Quigley
21. "Closer to Being Grown Up than Ever Before": Theatre as a Site of Passage in Children’s Fiction
Stephanie Tillotson
22. "A Theatre, that’s No Drawing Room, nor is it a House on a Raft": Discovering Theatre in Moominsummer Madness
Deniz Başar
23. The Bildungsroman Goes to Acting School
Chris Hay
24. Stage Struck: Theatre as Vocation in Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s
Sheila Rabillard
Part V. Theatre-Fiction, Asymmetries, and Antitheatricalities
25. Theatre-Stories in Early Modern China
Mei Chun
26. Against Anti-Theatricality: The Stage as Respectable Profession in Florence Marryat’s Theatre-Novels
Catherine Quirk
27. Affect in the Theatre-Novel: Performing Shame(lessness) in Wilkie Collins’s No Name
Anja Hartl
28. "Waiting in the Wings": The Economics and Ethereality of Theatrical Space in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus
Rachael Newberry
29. Spectatorship and Myth: Zola’s Theatre Episodes in The Kill and Nana
Juliana Starr
30. Theatrical Extraneity: John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Dickensian Theatre-Fiction
Graham Wolfe
Selected List of Theatre-Fiction
Index
Biography
Graham Wolfe is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the National University of Singapore. His monograph, Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing, was published by Routledge in 2020, and his articles have appeared in journals including Modern Drama, Mosaic, Adaptation, and Performance Research.
