The house, the world, and the theatre: self-fashioning and authorial spaces in the prefaces of Hawthorne, Dickens, and James

Abstract

This Dissertation examines self-fashioning processes in prefaces and introductions by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, and Henry James. The general argument is that in these texts authorial identity is constructed through spatial metaphors and authorial figures of ideological and cultural resonance. The readings proposed connect these spatial metaphors and authorial figures - organized according to the groups 'house,' 'world,' and 'theater' - to the specific historical context and to ideologies circulating in the nineteenth-century. The main theoretical perspectives that support these readings are genre criticism, Greenblattian new historicism, and literary history. Greenblatt's concept of 'self-fashioning', in particular, constitutes an important operative device that enables the perception of authorship as a category that blurs the boundaries between social life and 'performance' (or between the 'authorial' and the 'actorial' modes). The authors studied appear, in this light, both as biographical subjects and participants in a 'theatre of images;' and the prefaces that 'house' these authors gain renewed interest for their historical relevance and imaginative quality.