Theories of Literary Realism

Theories of Literary Realism PDF Author: Dario Villanueva
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791433287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Theories of Literary Realism

Theories of Literary Realism PDF Author: Dario Villanueva
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791433287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Theories of Literary Realism

Theories of Literary Realism PDF Author: Dario Villanueva
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791433270
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
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

The Order of Forms

The Order of Forms PDF Author: Anna Kornbluh
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022665334X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
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: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste

Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste PDF Author: Toral Jatin Gajarawala
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823245241
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
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?

The Antinomies Of Realism

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

Get Book Here

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.

Affecting Fictions

Affecting Fictions PDF Author: Jane F. Thrailkill
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674025127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Beginning Realism

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

Get Book Here

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.

The Boundaries of Realism in World Literature

The Boundaries of Realism in World Literature PDF Author: Kornelije Kvas
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 179360911X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Lime Twig

The Lime Twig PDF Author: John Hawkes
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811200653
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind of the scheme and moves to muscle in on this bettors' dream of a long-odds situation. Worked out with all the meticulous detail, terror, and suspense of a nightmare, the tale is, on one level, comparable to a Graham Greene thriller; on another, it explores a group of people, their relationships fears, and loves. For as Leslie A. Fiedler says in his introduction, "John Hawkes.. . makes terror rather than love the center of his work, knowing all the while, of course, that there can be no terror without the hope for love and love's defeat . . . ."

Magical Realism

Magical Realism PDF Author: Lois Parkinson Zamora
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822316404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 598

Get Book Here

Book Description
On magical realism in literature