As our own scholarship becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, it is essential to revisit literary works that incorporate and emphasize the power of other art forms. Bakhtin contended that the novel subsumed the old, dusty genres of epic, lyric, and theatre, making theatre an outdated origin point. Nevertheless, novelists themselves found something relevant and vital enough about the form of theatre to engage with it in their fictions, restaging the inherently ephemeral play within the static pages of a book. While recent scholarship has focused more exclusively on theatre-fiction, a genre overtly dedicated to exploring the lives of actors and theatre professionals, this MLA special session proposes to expand on this work by examining three authors who engage with theatre as a motif rather than taking theatre as the primary subject. Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Virginia Woolf, bring the stage to the twentieth century novel and employ theatre as important ritual, an opportunity for celebration and revolution, positioning us as both reader and audience to the dramatic effects.

Beginning with questions of theatre-fiction as genre, Simon Dwyer examines Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh's generative melding of theatre-fiction and the detective novel, a move that sets her apart from her fellow 'queens of crime' Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham. Marsh’s insiders’ knowledge as an actor, author, director, and producer allows her to create vivid and realistic scenes that evoke the sights, sounds, and emotions of the theatre. Marsh’s characters not only portray the ‘show must go on’ ethic of performers, but they also experience the inherent risks of working in such a dangerous environment. Dwyer, a theatre practitioner himself, explores this backstage world of Ngaio Marsh’s novels, examining her rich descriptions of staging and theatrical elements rarely seen by audiences. By comparing these observations to the features of a typical playhouse, Dwyer demonstrates how Marsh's novels celebrate the often-overlooked aspects of theatrical production. Through this analysis, readers gain a deeper understanding of the behind-the-scenes world of her characters and the risks they face. Dwyer therefore highlights how Marsh’s insider’s knowledge of theatre and incorporation of theatre-fiction motifs enriches her novels and elevates the crime fiction genre.

Samuel McIntyre continues the consideration of an author celebrating, and revolutionizing, theatre in his paper on W.E.B. Du Bois's Dark Princess: A Romance (1928). Building upon Claudia Tate’s observations of generic oscillation, McIntyre's paper interprets the novel’s concluding pageant as a meta-theatrical enactment of sociopolitical, spiritual, and sensual desires (Dark Princess introduction [Banner Books 1995]). The novel’s dual spectacles are surrounded by extratextual appeals to Shakespeare’s Titania. Noting Brent Hayes Edward’s observation that this pageant shares its date with International Labor Day, McIntyre argues that spectacle revises the claustrophobic whiteness of Shakespeare’s comedy and posits eroticism as a tool of revolutionary liberation (The Practice of Diaspora [Harvard UP 2003]). Ultimately, the pageant’s invocation of theatrical performance serves as a paradigm of Du Bois’s 1926 insistence that his work be read as “propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy” (Criteria of Negro Art). Accordingly, this paper frames celebration and spectacle as crucial mechanisms for Du Bois’s political and aesthetic visions in Dark Princess.

Finally, Mark Deggan broadens the definition of theatre-fiction by arguing that one text that demands exegesis as performance in its own right. Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), not only redefines fictional poetics as primarily performative, but is itself an exemplar of the scenographic arts wherein the natural and social environments, performance, and text are together raised as an experiential continuum – one that is both symbiotic and inter-reactive. Employing continental performance theory and Stanton Garner Jr.’s work on embodiment on stage, Deggan proposes that Woolf’s mature fiction shows what it had always been, a revolutionary theatricalized occasioning wherein consciousness, language, and affect come together not only around a performance, but as that performance. Moreover, if the village play in Woolf’s scenario does not so much represent or comment upon or describe a performance as enact it, Deggan's paper proposes to analyze the novel in a dialogical manner, finally suggesting how Woolf’s text can best be understood as a presentation of theatrical consciousness unfolding in situ.