uses Ruskin to reflect upon the duration of literary form: “Let us imag- ine new ways of accounting for the temporality of both social and lit- erary forms, structures which are neither unchanging outlines nor historical moments entirely past” (“Durations of Presents Past: Ruskin and the Accretive Quality of Time,” Victorian Studies 59, no. 1 [2016]: 94–97, 96–97). 6. Sue Zemka’s Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) provides a compel- ling example of using temporality as the basis for a larger account of hermeneutics, modernity, and the novel. 7. Alex Woloch theorizes characters in the novel as “jostl[ing] for limited space within the same fictive universe” (The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003], 13). 8. Thomas Hardy, “I Look Into My Glass,” in Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Palgrave, 2001), 81, lines 2, 6. Theatricality SHARON ARONOFSKY WELTMAN D URING its first season, the hit television series Glee aired an episode named “Theatricality,” in which the talented glee club kids pay homage to Lady Gaga and Kiss. 1 They wear homemade versions of the stars’ hyperextravagant costumes in their high school’s hallways as well as on stage, using their wild (and wildly creative) outfits for defiant self- expression, braving harsh reactions from bullies and the school principal. Beyond the students’ personal flair, the title draws attention to the epi- sode as exuberant performance rather than as a mimetic approximation of real life. Because “theatricality” denotes knowingness about the medium’s effect, it is also defined negatively: “the quality of being exaggerated and excessively dramatic.” 2 This is how Thomas Carlyle uses the term in its oldest recorded instance (which is Victorian): The French Revolution (1837) opposes theatricality to sincerity. 3 Here Carlyle displays the antitheatricality that Jonas Barish chronicles in The Anti-theatrical TEMPORALITY, THEATRICALITY 913 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318001171 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 206.217.131.106, on 14 Apr 2019 at 13:48:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at