A literary lineage of self-as-performance predates postmodern performativity theory

Evidence

Poirier argues that writers such as Robert Frost, Norman Mailer, and Henry James (but he could ”almost as profitably consider the self as performance in Byron, in Yeats, or in Lawrence … Andrew Marvell as well as Thoreau”) ”treat any occasion as a ‘scene’ or a stage for dramatizing the self as a performer” (86); ”what excites [each writer] most in a work is finally himself as a performer” (87). — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 645

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Theater of the Ridiculous foregrounded role-playing itself as its subject; Individualist acting methods subordinate narrative form to autonomous character; Twentieth-century serious fiction turned inward toward the psychological (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The Theater of the Ridiculous foregrounded role-playing itself as its subject #exemplifies (0.80)
• Novels can undercut their own ideological message through meta-literary self-exposure #exemplifies (0.75)
• Individualist acting methods subordinate narrative form to autonomous character #exemplifies (0.72)
• Twentieth-century serious fiction turned inward toward the psychological #exemplifies (0.72)
• Modernist inwardness paired with a utopian sense of self and world transformation #exemplifies (0.70) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 681