Winter's Tales

Book excerpt: Winter's Tales tackles the question of whether narrative and drama are as different from each other as some scholars have assumed. By examining everything from voice and tense to "scene and summary," George, a theater professor and novelist, analyzes the many choices a writer has when framing a story. She addresses narrative theoretical ground before focusing on contemporary plays that are "novelistic." She finishes the study by examining the problems of adaptation from novel to stage. Her account is-by way of its essayistic style-personal, at times a writer's journal of reading and writing discoveries. In Winter's Tales, George demonstrates, among other things, the ways the diegetic is evident in the very content of frame plays and divided plays: she distinguishes between kinds of memory plays by cataloguing the possible stances of the narrator: she also covers subjects like multiple narration, and she gives accounts of the epic, dramatic, and lyric solutions to adapting novels. Kathleen George is a Professor in the Theatre Arts Department at the University of Pittsburgh.