According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. Empty Houses challenges this consensus by reexamining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly--the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin--writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies--this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, David Kurnick reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, Kurnick shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. Investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers, he establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority. In the process he illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, Empty Houses provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.

Introduction Interiority and Its Discontents 1Theater Demetaphorized 1Theater Dethematized: Spatializations of the Novel 10The Vocation of Failure 24
Chapter One: Acoustics in the Thackeray Theater 29"The Play" 29Trivializing History, or, Domesticity 33Diminishing Returns: Vanity Fair's Theatricality 42The Box-Opener: A Note on Becky Sharp 50Empty House Theatricals: The Wolves and the Lamb 53In the Recess of Consciousness: Lovel the Widower 56
Chapter Two: George Eliot's Lot 67Theater and Abstraction 67Romola, Felix Holt, and the Uses of Inwardness 74The Spanish Gypsy's Universal Theater 82Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and the Cast of Mind 91
Chapter Three: Henry James's Awkward Stage 105Other Almost Anyhow 105The Performance Imaginary: The Other House, 1896 113The Performance Imaginary II: The Other House, 1909 121In the Sociable Dusk of The Awkward Age 126James and His Kind 136What Does Jamesian Style Want? 144
Chapter Four: Joyce Unperformed 153Joycean Exposures 153Epiphany and the Obscene Body 158Ibsen, Exiles, and the Scene of Sex 167Backstage at the Library: "Scylla and Charybdis" 178The Ineluctable Modality of the Legible: "Circe" 183
Epilogue In the Kingdom of Whomever: Baldwin'sMethod 192Notes 207Index 245