TABLE OF CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 7 -- INTRODUCTION 9 -- CHAPTER ONE: THE STRONG PERFORMATIVE 25 -- The performative: early history 25 -- Logos, the originary instance of the strong performative: some Biblical examples 31 -- A performative genre par excellence: the declaration and the manifesto 38 -- Word power (Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God -- Norman Mailer, 'The Time of Her Time') 45 -- Alternative realities as performative creations (Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger -- Ambrose Bierce, 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge') 50 -- The language games of irony and make-believe (Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) 59 -- CHAPTER TWO: EXTENDING THE PERFORMATIVE 71 -- Performativity in theories of the subject 73 -- Performance and performative constructions of the subject 85 -- Performativity of reading and writing 89 -- Presupposition 92 -- Presupposition and the (performative) production of meaning 93 -- CHAPTER THREE: PERFORMING GENDER 97 -- Recipes for men and women: gender as (hetero)sexualized performance 103 -- Gender performances and performative genders 106 -- Performances of gender compliance (Henry James, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove -- Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie -- Kate Chopin, The Awakening, 'A Pair of Silk Stockings' -- Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth) 108 -- The performance of cultural codes: the Southern woman (William Faulkner, 'A Rose for Emily' -- Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire -- Flannery O'Connor, 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find') 120 -- Some misogynist reversals (Jonathan Swift, 'A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,' T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land) 129 -- Performative genders: non-compliance with social norms (Gertrude Stein, Three Lives -- Willa Cather, My Ántonia -- Djuna Barnes, Nightwood.

H.D., HERmione -- Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe) 131 -- CHAPTER FOUR: PERFORMING SEXUALITY 151 -- The new kid on the block of binary thinking: conceptualizing the homosexual 153 -- The resisting narrative: homosexual subtext beneath the heterosexual text (Henry James, 'The Beast in the Jungle,' 'In the Cage') 156 -- CHAPTER FIVE: PERFORMING PASSING 167 -- Gender passing (Mark Twain, Is He Dead? -- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita -- David Hwang, M. Butterfly) 168 -- The convergence of categories: race and class passing (James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man -- Nella Larsen, Passing -- Philip Roth, The Human Stain) 182 -- CONCLUSION 201 -- WORKS CITED 205 -- INDEX 225.