Narrative, persona and performance: The case of Theresa May 2016–2017

A narrative and performance analysis of the period between the 2016 EU referendum and the 2017 general election makes an empirical and theoretical contribution to understanding personalised politics at the present time. This article contends that Theresa May’s initial success proceeded from her rhetorical construction and performance of a persona founded on the archetypal healer, together with a narrative based on the myth of One Nation. However, her decision as Prime Minister to align herself with the pro-Brexit constituency and her neglect of the ‘just about managing’ called both her persona and narrative into question. The highly personalised general election campaign ensured the focus stayed on May, while the manifesto offered her a new ‘flawed’ narrative that resulted in the collapse of her early leadership image. By the time of the election, May was performing neither the narrative nor the persona; she was effectively absent from her own campaign.

‘Mere Lookers-On at Life’: Point of View and Spectator Narrative

This essay develops a new approach to print narratives about theatregoing during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Immensely popular with contemporary readers, theatrical memoirs and diaries have been a boon to theatre historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but these texts have more often been studied in spite of their subjective perspectives than because of them. Building on work in theatre historiography and audience studies, this essay seeks to transform the spectator’s discursive acts of shaping, framing, and stressing from an obstacle into an opportunity. In order to resituate historical spectator narratives in a wider narrative context, I read diaries and essays by Henry Crabb Robinson and Lady Maud Tree in conversation with Charlotte Brontë’s fictional scenes of spectatorship in Villette. This intertextual approach, I suggest, yields a more complete understanding of how different points of view facilitated claims about performance. In particular, I explore how gender affected point of view. While male reviewers and diarists often employ a disinterested narrative persona that de-emphasises their own bodies, I argue that many actress autobiographies craft an alternative form of narrative authority that makes use of the limitations of embodiment – qualities like immobility, bodily sensation, and circumscribed vision.

A Hero in the Friendly Arctic: Deconstructing Vilhjalmur Stefansson's Rhetorical Maneuver

The article deals with Arctic explorer and anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson's self-presentation in the expedition account The Friendly Arctic: The Story of Five Years in Polar Regions (1921), which tells the story of his travels and trials in the Canadian High Arctic in the years between 1913-1918. The account has been considered a key text to Stefansson's Arctic career, and provides a textbook example of his characteristic theory of living off the country in the so-called Eskimo way. Against the background of Stefansson's debated position as Arctic expert and visionary, I ask if it is possible to read the kind of criticism with which Stefansson frequently was met as rooted in some of the narrative aspects of his account. The narrative persona or implied author is a central element in the literature of exploration, as several literary scholars have pointed out. My reading is centred around the implied author of The Friendly Arctic, which I argue must be read in light of the sometimes conflicting roles given to Stefansson as protagonist and narrator in his own story. Close-readings of passages from the account raise the dilemma of how it is possible to present oneself as a hero in an essentially friendly Arctic.