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Reviewed by:
  • Novel Stages: Drama and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France
  • Claire Kew (bio)
Pratima Prasad and Susan McCready, eds. Novel Stages: Drama and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007.

When one is asked to list the great dramaturges who have defined French theater, the names Corneille, Molière, Racine, Marivaux, and Beaumarchais inevitably spring to mind. A reflection upon the more recent past would certainly add playwrights Sartre, Ionesco, and Beckett to the list. While the first group of dramatists achieved greatness in the 1700’s and 1800’s, the final trio made a name for themselves during the second half of the twentieth century. With the possible exception of Victor Hugo, who is arguably more well known for his orientalist poetry and romantic novels, the nineteenth century failed to produce memorable contributions to the dramatic art. In their book Novel Stages: Drama and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France, a collection of essays from dix-neuvièmistes, editors Pratima Prasad and Susan McCready examine the apparent gap which is present in nineteenth-century French theater, attempting to shed light on the individuals currently being overlooked by French scholars, as well as the reasons why.

In their introductory essay to Novel Stages entitled “Setting the Stage: For an Approach to Drama and the Novel” Prasad and McCready address the rise of the novel at the expense of the theater in nineteenth-century France. New commercial practices in publishing, improved printing techniques, and increased literacy rates (particularly among the working class and women) in conjunction with the numerous obstacles facing the nineteenth-century author who wished to see his work performed on the stage served to promote an explosion in the publication of novels, while simultaneously exercising a negative impact on the profession of the playwright in France. Somewhat paradoxically, despite the increasing predilection for written fiction, the great writers of the time still dreamt of becoming renowned playwrights, and the theater remained the place to see and to be seen in France. Author of the celebrated twenty-novel series Les Rougon-Macquart, and one of the most prolific writers of the nineteenth century, Émile Zola was not an exception to the rule: he, too, dreamed of having his work represented on the stage. In “Naturalism on Stage: The Performance and Reception of Zola’s Messidor,” the sixth essay of Prasad and McCready’s collection, Elizabeth Emery reminds us that: “Zola had long been involved with the theater, both as an assiduous critic and as a playwright and participant in theatrical adaptations of his own novels, including Les Mystères de Marseille (1867), L’Assommoir (1879), Nana (1881), Pot-Bouille (1883), Le Ventre de Paris (1887), Germinal (1888), Une page d’amour (1893), Au Bonheur des Dames (1896), and La Terre (1902). Writing for the stage was not only one of Zola’s earliest ambitions, but “a passion” according to Janice Best in her study Adaptation et expérimentation: essai sur la méthode expérimentale d’Emile Zola (cited in Novel Stages 130). Although the collection of essays in Novel Stages presents analyses of a profusion of nineteenthcentury French authors—Flaubert, Hugo, Balzac, Mérimée, Stendhal, Sand, [End Page 1019] Gautier, and the Goncourts, among others—whose connections to the stage are grouped into three categories: I. “Between Genres: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” II. “The Novel on Stage: Musical and Theatrical Adaptations” and III. “Popular Theater and the Nineteenth-Century Novelist,” Zola is the only author to be represented in two of the nine studies, and to traverse two of the three sections. In the two essays of the collection that are dedicated to the father of naturalism, “Naturalism on Stage: The Performance and Reception of Zola’s Messidor” and “L’Assommoir : From Novel to Drama to Theatrical Parody,” authors Elizabeth Emery and Catherine Dousteyssier- Khoze offer an informative, albeit somewhat contradictory, glimpse into the active creative exchange between the page and the stage that existed in nineteenth-century France.

As its title—“The Novel on Stage: Musical and Theatrical Adaptations”—indicates, the second group of essays in Novel Stages is dedicated to studies of nineteenth-century French novels...

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