The Novel Stage traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a new approach to the history of the English novel that examines how the collaboration of genres contributed to the novel’s narrative form and to the modern organization of literature.

MARCIE FRANK is a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism from Dryden to Manley and How to be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal, and co-editor with Jonathan Goldberg and Karen Newman of This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature.

List of Illustrations
 
Preface: The Novel Stage                                                                                         
 
Chapter 1: Genre, Media, and the Theory of the Novel                                            
 
Chapter 2: The Reform of the Rake from Rochester to Inchbald                              
 
Chapter 3: Performing Reading in Richardson and Fielding                                       
 
Chapter 4: The Promise of Embarrassment: Frances Burney's Theater of Shame    
 
Chapter 5: Melodrama in Inchbald and Austen                                                         
 
Coda: The Melodramatic Address                                                                             
 
Acknowledgements                                                                                                   
 
Bibliography