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, 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 After Modernism

Realism After Modernism PDF Author: Devin Fore
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
The human figure made a spectacular return in visual art and literature in the 1920s. Following modernism's withdrawal, nonobjective painting gave way to realistic depictions of the body and experimental literary techniques were abandoned for novels with powerfully individuated characters. But the celebrated return of the human in the interwar years was not as straightforward as it may seem. In Realism after Modernism, Devin Fore challenges the widely accepted view that this period represented a return to traditional realist representation and its humanist postulates. Interwar realism, he argues, did not reinstate its nineteenth-century predecessor but invoked realism as a strategy of mimicry that anticipates postmodernist pastiche. Through close readings of a series of works by German artists and writers of the period, Fore investigates five artistic devices that were central to interwar realism. He analyzes Bauhaus polymath László Moholy-Nagy's use of linear perspective; three industrial novels riven by the conflict between the temporality of capital and that of labor; Brecht's socialist realist plays, which explore new dramaturgical principles for depicting a collective subject; a memoir by Carl Einstein that oscillates between recollection and self-erasure; and the idiom of physiognomy in the photomontages of John Heartfield. Fore's readings reveal that each of these "rehumanized" works in fact calls into question the very categories of the human upon which realist figuration is based. Paradoxically, even as the human seemed to make a triumphal return in the culture of the interwar period, the definition of the human and the integrity of the body were becoming more tenuous than ever before. Interwar realism did not hearken back to earlier artistic modes but posited new and unfamiliar syntaxes of aesthetic encounter, revealing the emergence of a human subject quite unlike anything that had come before.

Russian Realisms

Russian Realisms PDF Author: Molly Brunson
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 1501757539
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converged to form the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, a tradition that spanned almost half a century—from the youthful projects of the Natural School and the critical realism of the age of reform to the mature masterpieces of Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the paintings of the Wanderers, Repin chief among them. By examining the classics of the tradition, Brunson explores the emergence of multiple realisms from the gaps, disruptions, and doubts that accompany the self-conscious project of representing reality. These manifestations of realism are united not by how they look or what they describe, but by their shared awareness of the fraught yet critical task of representation. By tracing the engagement of literature and painting with aesthetic debates on the sister arts, Brunson argues for a conceptualization of realism that transcends artistic media. Russian Realisms integrates the lesser-known tradition of Russian painting with the familiar masterpieces of Russia's great novelists, highlighting both the common ground in their struggles for artistic realism and their cultural autonomy and legitimacy. This erudite study will appeal to scholars interested in Russian literature and art, comparative literature, art history, and nineteenth-century realist movements.

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Realisms

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Realisms PDF Author: Delia Correa Sousa de
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136749985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
The essays in this volume trace the experimentation of nineteenth-century writers in advancing new modes of realist fiction while revitalizing the inheritance of the Gothic and the Romantic. Focusing on some of the most popular novels of the century (Northanger Abbey, Jayne Eyre, Dombey and Son, Middlemarch, Far from the Madding Crowd and Germinal), this attractive volume explores some of the recurring themes in nineteenth-century fiction: aspiration and vocation; social class; sexual politics; political reform; colonialism and commerce. This is an ideal introduction to some of the major fictional achievements of the first industrial era, and to most of the crucial themes in nineteenth-century fiction.

Representing Realists in Victorian Literature and Criticism

Representing Realists in Victorian Literature and Criticism PDF Author: Daniel Brown
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319406795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This book is about the historical moment when writers and critics first used the term “realism” to describe representation in literature and painting. While scholarship on realism tends to proceed from an assumption that the term has a long-established meaning and history, this book reveals that mid-nineteenth-century critics and writers first used the term reluctantly, with much confusion over what it might actually mean. It did not acquire the ready meaning we now take for granted until the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, its first definitions came primarily by way of example and analogy, through descriptions of current practitioners, or through fictionalized representations of artists. By investigating original debates over the term “realism,” this book shows how writers simultaneously engaged with broader concerns about the changing meanings of what was real and who had the authority to decide this.

Realist Vision

Realist Vision PDF Author: Peter Brooks
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300127855
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Realist Vision explores the claim to represent the world “as it is.” Peter Brooks takes a new look at the realist tradition and its intense interest in the visual. Discussing major English and French novels and paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brooks provides a lively and perceptive view of the realist project. Centering each chapter on a single novel or group of paintings, Brooks examines the “invention” of realism beginning with Balzac and Dickens, its apogee in the work of such as Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola, and its continuing force in James and modernists such as Woolf. He considers also the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud, and such recent phenomena as “photorealism” and “reality TV.”

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel PDF Author: Lisa Rodensky
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191652512
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 829

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Book Description
Much has been written about the Victorian novel, and for good reason. The cultural power it exerted (and, to some extent, still exerts) is beyond question. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to this thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics (the novel and science, the Victorian Bildungroman) as well as essays on topics often overlooked (the novel and classics, the novel and the OED, the novel, and allusion). Manifesting the increasing interdisciplinarity of Victorian studies, its essays situate the novel within a complex network of relations (among, for instance, readers, editors, reviewers, and the novelists themselves; or among different cultural pressures - the religious, the commercial, the legal). The handbook's essays also build on recent bibliographic work of remarkable scope and detail, responding to the growing attention to print culture. With a detailed introduction and 36 newly commissioned chapters by leading and emerging scholars — beginning with Peter Garside's examination of the early nineteenth-century novel and ending with two essays proposing the 'last Victorian novel' — the handbook attends to the major themes in Victorian scholarship while at the same time creating new possibilities for further research. Balancing breadth and depth, the clearly-written, nonjargon -laden essays provide readers with overviews as well as original scholarship, an approach which will serve advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars. As the Victorians get further away from us, our versions of their culture and its novel inevitably change; this Handbook offers fresh explorations of the novel that teach us about this genre, its culture, and, by extension, our own.

The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination

The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Pre-Cinematic Imagination PDF Author: Alberto Gabriele
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 1137561319
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description


Nineteenth-century Literature

Nineteenth-century Literature PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
Contains articles which focus on a broad spectrum of significant figures in fiction, philosophy, and criticism such as Austen, Carlyle, Dickens,Thackeray, the Brontes, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, and Henry James.

The Brontës in the World of the Arts

The Brontës in the World of the Arts PDF Author: Sandra Hagan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351893505
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Although previous scholarship has acknowledged the importance of the visual arts to the Brontës, relatively little attention has been paid to the influence of music, theatre, and material culture on the siblings' lives and literature. This interdisciplinary collection presents new research on the Brontës' relationship to the wider world of the arts, including their relationship to the visual arts. The contributors examine the siblings' artistic ambitions, productions, and literary representations of creative work in both amateur and professional realms. Also considered are re-envisionings of the Brontës' works, with an emphasis on those created in the artistic media the siblings themselves knew or practiced. With essays by scholars who represent the fields of literary studies, music, art, theatre studies, and material culture, the volume brings together the strongest current research and suggests areas for future work on the Brontës and their cultural contexts.