Realism's Empire

Realism's Empire PDF Author: Geoffrey Baker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
If realist novels are the literary avatars of secular science and rational progress, then why are so many canonical realist works organized around a fear of that progress? Realism is openly indebted, at the level of form and content, to imperialist and scientific advances. However, critical emphasis on this has obscured the extent to which major novelists of the period openly worried about the fate of mystery and the dissolution of tradition that accompanied science's shrinking of the world. Realism's modernization is inseparable from nostalgia. In Realism's Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Geoffrey Baker demonstrates that realist fiction's stance toward both progress and the foreign or supernatural is much more complex than established scholarship has assumed. The work of Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and Theodor Fontane explicitly laments the loss of mystery in the world due to increased knowledge and exploration. To counter this loss and to generate the complications required for narrative, these three authors import peripheral, usually colonial figures into the metropolitan centers they otherwise depict as disenchanted and rationalized: Paris, London, and Berlin. Baker's book examines the consequences of this duel for realist narrative and readers' understandings of its historical moment. In so doing, Baker shows Balzac, Trollope, and Fontane grappling with new realities that frustrate their inherited means of representation and oversee a significant shift in the development of the novel.

Realism's Empire

Realism's Empire PDF Author: Geoffrey Baker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
If realist novels are the literary avatars of secular science and rational progress, then why are so many canonical realist works organized around a fear of that progress? Realism is openly indebted, at the level of form and content, to imperialist and scientific advances. However, critical emphasis on this has obscured the extent to which major novelists of the period openly worried about the fate of mystery and the dissolution of tradition that accompanied science's shrinking of the world. Realism's modernization is inseparable from nostalgia. In Realism's Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Geoffrey Baker demonstrates that realist fiction's stance toward both progress and the foreign or supernatural is much more complex than established scholarship has assumed. The work of Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and Theodor Fontane explicitly laments the loss of mystery in the world due to increased knowledge and exploration. To counter this loss and to generate the complications required for narrative, these three authors import peripheral, usually colonial figures into the metropolitan centers they otherwise depict as disenchanted and rationalized: Paris, London, and Berlin. Baker's book examines the consequences of this duel for realist narrative and readers' understandings of its historical moment. In so doing, Baker shows Balzac, Trollope, and Fontane grappling with new realities that frustrate their inherited means of representation and oversee a significant shift in the development of the novel.

Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction PDF Author: Rae Greiner
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421406535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Rae Greiner proposes that sympathy is integral to the form of the classic nineteenth-century realist novel. Following the philosophy of Adam Smith, Greiner argues that sympathy does more than foster emotional identification with others; it is a way of thinking along with them. By abstracting emotions, feelings turn into detached figures of speech that may be shared. Sympathy in this way produces realism; it is the imaginative process through which the real is substantiated. In Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction Greiner shows how this imaginative process of sympathy is written into three novelistic techniques regularly associated with nineteenth-century fiction: metonymy, free indirect discourse, and realist characterization. She explores the work of sentimentalist philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham and realist novelists Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. -- Adela Pinch, University of Michigan

Narrative Factuality

Narrative Factuality PDF Author: Monika Fludernik
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110484994
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 751

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Book Description
The study of narrative—the object of the rapidly growing discipline of narratology—has been traditionally concerned with the fictional narratives of literature, such as novels or short stories. But narrative is a transdisciplinary and transmedial concept whose manifestations encompass both the fictional and the factual. In this volume, which provides a companion piece to Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe’s Fiktionalität: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, the use of narrative to convey true and reliable information is systematically explored across media, cultures and disciplines, as well as in its narratological, stylistic, philosophical, and rhetorical dimensions. At a time when the notion of truth has come under attack, it is imperative to reaffirm the commitment to facts of certain types of narrative, and to examine critically the foundations of this commitment. But because it takes a background for a figure to emerge clearly, this book will also explore nonfactual types of narratives, thereby providing insights into the nature of narrative fiction that could not be reached from the narrowly literary perspective of early narratology.

Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature PDF Author: Alison Byerly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521581165
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This book confronts a significant paradox in the development of literary realism: the very novels that present themselves as purveyors and celebrants of direct, ordinary human experience also manifest an obsession with art that threatens to sabotage their Realist claims. Unlike previous studies of the role of visual art, or music, or theatre in Victorian literature, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature examines the juxtaposition of all of these arts in the works of Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and others. Alison Byerly combines close textual analysis with discussion of relevant ancillary topics to illuminate the place of different arts within nineteenth-century British culture. Her book, which also contains sixteen illustrations, represents an effort to bridge the growing gap between aesthetics and cultural studies.

Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction PDF Author: Daniel A. Novak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521885256
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An illustrated study of the interactions between photographic technique and literary representation in the nineteenth century.

Realism

Realism PDF Author: Pam Morris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113458377X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
A clear, reader-friendly guide to debates around realism, this guide is vital reading for students of literature, in particular those working on the realist novel.

Beginning Realism

Beginning Realism PDF Author: Steven Earnshaw
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847794041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
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.

Novel Institutions

Novel Institutions PDF Author: Mary L. Mullen
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474453260
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Intro -- Series Editor's Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part I Necessary and Unnecessary Anachronisms -- Chapter 1 Realism and the Institution of the Nineteenth-Century Novel -- Part II Forgetting and Remembrance -- Chapter 2 William Carleton's and Charles Kickham's Ethnographic Realism -- Chapter 3 George Eliot's Anachronistic Literacies -- Part III Untimely Improvement -- Chapter 4 Charles Dickens's Reactionary Reform -- Chapter 5 George Moore's Untimely Bildung -- Coda: Inhabiting Institutions -- Bibliography -- Index.

The Antinomies Of Realism

The Antinomies Of Realism PDF Author: Fredric Jameson
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781681910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
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.

Vital Signs

Vital Signs PDF Author: Lawrence Rothfield
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400820685
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.