The preface as stage: the theatrical trope and the performance of authorial identities in the nineteenth century

Geraldo Magela Cáffaro

doi:10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p265

Authors

Geraldo Magela Cáffaro Universidade Estadual de Montes Claros Montes Claros State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p265

Abstract

This essay explores references to the theatre in prefaces by Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James. Particular emphasis is given to the way these authors employ figures such as stage manager and dramatist to reach their audiences and project authorial images. The figures in question are historicized and discussed in light of the concepts identified by the terms performative and theatre of images and the argument proposed is that references to the theatre reveal tensions between self-display and self-concealment, as well as between the assertion of authority and its subversion and fragmentation in nineteenth-century prefatory writing.

Author Biography

Geraldo Magela Cáffaro, Universidade Estadual de Montes Claros Montes Claros State University

Geraldo M. Caffaro is a PhD in literary studies (Federal University of Minas Gerais UFMG) and a professor of Anglophone literature at the State University of Montes Claros. Among other publications is the book recently published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing entitled The House, the World, and the Theater: Self-fashioning and Authorial Spaces in the prefaces of Hawthorne, Dickens, and James. He earned his master's in Anglophone literature also at UFMG. His research areas include English and American literature of the nineteenth century, theory and literary criticism, comparative literature, paratexts and diaries of writers, literature, history and memory culture, poetics of modernity.