Realism has not only shaped important schools and periods in literary history, but has also been a fundamental constant of all literature, its first theoretical formulation being the principle of mimesis in Aristotle's Poetics. Realism can be considered by extension one of the main aspects of literary theory, the aims of which must be to define its concepts clearly and to neutralize the imprecision, polysemy, and ambiguity that often characterized the application of realism.
Explores the possibilities and limits of a concept of realism that seeks a point of equilibrium between the principle of autonomy of the literary work vis-a-vis reality and the relations that the work clearly establishes with this reality. Argues that by concentrating on the study of the literary work as a verbal construction, the traditional of formalism and New Criticism has neglected the mimetic aspect of the literary problematic, dissociating literature from life. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This book is a valuable theoretical and critical contribution to the study of realism inworld literature. Proceeding from the mimetic theories of the era of antiquity, and proceeding to explore formalists, structuralists, theories of possible worlds, and theories of simulation, Kvas points to the fictionality of (mimetic) realism, to literature and art as the creation of new, fictional aesthetic worlds, even when—as in the case of realism—there is a programmatic and practical inclination of such art and literature toward the world of the historical and the social—the real in the original sense of the word. This study will enable readers to confront, in a new and dependable manner, the issues of literary realism and its digressions into magical realism.
Realism is an essential concept in literary studies, yet for a variety of reasons it has not received the attention and clarity it deserves, often being dismissed as ‘too slippery’ to be of use. This accessible study remedies that failing for students and scholars of English Literature and Literary Theory alike, plainly setting out what realism is, the issues surrounding it, and its role in other major literary modes such as modernism and postmodernism. Beginning Realism gives detailed coverage of the nineteenth-century realist novel through its focus on novels by Gaskell, Eliot, Trollope, Dickens, Mrs Oliphant, Thackeray and Zola. As well as discussing ‘the novel’, the book also includes chapters on the use of realism in drama and poetry and a chapter on ‘the language of realism’, another aspect often overlooked in analysis of the concept.
Thrailkill offers a new understanding of late-nineteenth-century American literary realism that draws on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, positioning her argument against the emotionless interpretations of the New Critics.
The Antinomies of Realism is a history ofthe nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives – what today’s book reviewers dub “serious novels,” which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past. Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism’s emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history. In contemporary writing, other forms of representation – for which the term “postmodern” is too glib – have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell’s novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices. In a coda, Jameson explains how “realistic” narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.
In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.
Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism--progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental--in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit ("untouchable caste") fiction. Drawing on a wide array of writings from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V. S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce?
Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the twentieth century, known for such highly acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. Yet he began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking attempt to understand how and why we read. The text anticipates by decades the ideas and concepts of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, and postcolonialism, as well as cognitive approaches to literature that are only now gaining traction. Employing the cutting-edge approaches of contemporary psychology and sociology, Soseki created a model for studying the conscious experience of reading literature as well as a theory for how the process changes over time and across cultures. Along with Theory of Literature, this volume reproduces a later series of lectures and essays in which Soseki continued to develop his theories. By insisting that literary taste is socially and historically determined, Soseki was able to challenge the superiority of the Western canon, and by grounding his theory in scientific knowledge, he was able to claim a universal validity.
The realist theory of international relations is based on a particularly gloomy set of assumptions about universal human motives. Believing people to be essentially asocial, selfish, and untrustworthy, realism counsels a politics of distrust and competition in the international arena. What Moves Man subjects realism to a broad and deep critique. Freyberg-Inan argues, first, that realist psychology is incomplete and suffers from a pessimistic bias. Second, she explains how this bias systematically undermines both realist scholarship and efforts to promote international cooperation and peace. Third, she argues that realism's bias has a tendency to function as a self-fulfilling prophecy: it nurtures and promotes the very behaviors it assumes predominate human nature. Freyberg-Inan concludes by suggesting how a broader and more complex view of human motivation would deliver more complete explanations of international behavior, reduce the risk of bias, and better promote practical progress in the conduct of international affairs.
