In:Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives
Edited by Dirk Göttsche, Rosa Mucignat and Robert Weninger
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXII] 2021
► pp. vii–xii
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Published online: 21 April 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxii.toc
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxii.toc
Table of contents
List of illustrationsIX
Editors’ preface and acknowledgmentsXI
Note on translations, cross-references and documentationXIII
Introduction1
Dirk Göttsche
Rosa Mucignat
Robert Weninger
Chapter 1.What is Realism?29
Core Essay: What is Realism? Ideas and debates31
Thomas Pavel
Galin Tihanov
1.Form and truth: Reconsidering Lukács’s theory of realism in the context of other theories of Realism33
2.The tasks of realism, or the confluence and divergence of artistic practice and theory38
2.1Verisimilitude and genre38
2.2Who are we? Community and culture41
2.3How to understand the world in which we live43
2.4Does literature follow the path of history?46
2.5How ugly, how immoral is the real?48
2.6High art and popular literature51
3.The versatility of realism53
3.1Realism in touch with its neighbors54
3.2Surface and depth59
Case studies
The Contest of Realism: German Marxist ‘realism debates’ from the 1930s to the 1950s65
Robert Weninger
How Real is Realism? Gérard de Nerval’s “bizarre arrangements of life”81
Régine Borderie
The Emergence of the Novel in India and Competing Modes of Realism89
Sascha Ebeling
Chapter 2.Routes into Realism101
Core Essay: Routes into Realism: Multiple beginnings, shared catalysts, transformative dynamics103
Ann Caesar
Anne Duprat
Dirk Göttsche
Rae Greiner
Anne Lounsbery
Stephen Roberts
1.Introduction103
2.From the late eighteenth century to realism: Sentimentalism and its legacies in realist poetics107
2.1From ‘sentimental’ to ‘sympathetic’ realism in British literature108
2.2Sincerity as a route into psychological realism in French literature114
2.3The family novel and Enlightenment legacies in German realism117
2.4Manzoni and the legacy of the romance in Italian literature119
3.Genre innovation as a route into Realism121
3.1Through romanticism to realism: The rise of the historical novel as a catalyst of realist narrative122
3.1.1Walter Scott’s reinvention of the historical novel
3.1.2Significant timeframes: The Early Modern period and the rise of realism in the French historical novel
(1826–1848)
3.1.3From romance to Italian historical realism: Manzoni’s I promessi sposi
3.1.4Galdós and the Spanish novela de costumbres
3.2The nineteenth-century Zeitroman as the historical novel of the present138
3.3Short forms as catalysts of realist representation141
3.3.1The English, French and German prose sketch
3.3.2
Cuadros de costumbres and the Spanish realist novella and novel
3.3.3The emergence of realism in Russian literature
3.3.4English parafiction and loco-descriptive poetry
3.3.5The Italian novella
4.Proto-Realisms: Early realist poetics and literary practice157
4.1English proto-realism and the disruption of consensual poetics158
4.2The dialectics of idealism and realism in early German realism161
4.3Contemporaneity and mimetic illusion in early French realism165
5.The language of realism: The emergence of realist styles and techniques168
5.1Free indirect discourse in English and French realism169
5.2Stylistic profiles of early realism in Italian, German, Russian and Spanish172
6.Conclusions, perspectives, challenges180
Case studies
Routes into Realism: Painting, from the eighteenth century into the early nineteenth191
Brendan Prendeville
Routes into American Realism213
Graham Thompson
Realism and Translation: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for an Austro-Hungarian minority and
beyond231
Tatjana Jukić
Chapter 3.Time and Space245
Core Essay: Fleeting Moments and Unstable Spaces: Explorations of time and space in realism247
Svend Erik Larsen
Rosa Mucignat
1.The dialectic of time and space247
2.Spatio-temporalities of realism249
2.1Embodied and disembodied spatio-temporality249
2.2Public and private, work and leisure: Two complementary spatio-temporal oppositions251
3.Gendered spaces252
3.1Inside/outside253
3.2Home and the world256
3.3Private and public259
4.Global and local refractions262
5.History and historicity267
5.1Human agency267
5.2Progress272
5.3Chance and speed277
5.4Stability on the edge281
6.Details and spatial representation284
7.The realist poetics of time and space286
7.1Prose and the everyday world: Metonymy296
7.2Everyday life: Chronotopes301
7.2.1Dismantling the idyll
7.2.2Revolutionizing the salon
8.Beyond European realism311
8.1Other places311
8.2Other subjectivities313
Case studies
Cartographic Realism in Nineteenth-Century Literature321
Anders Engberg-Pedersen
Mobile Spaces: The impact of traveling in realism337
Svend Erik Larsen
Reclaiming Space, Mastering Time in African Postcolonial Fiction357
Itala Vivan
Utopian Island Realism in J. M. Synge’s Travel Narrative of The
Aran Islands and Tomás O’Crohan’s Autobiography The Islander
373
Niall Sreenan
In-Between Spaces in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore: Time and space in Japanese realism387
Midori Tanaka Atkins
Haptic Realism: Erik Poppe’s film U-July 22 and the aesthetics of duration403
Asbjørn Grønstad
Chapter 4.Rereading Nineteenth-Century Realism415
Core Essay: Literary Playing Fields in Motion: Remapping and rereading nineteenth-century realism417
Dirk Göttsche
1.Introduction: Rethinking nineteenth-century realism417
2.Realism, the nation and modernization425
3.Realism, gender and the family435
4.Transcultural dialogue and realist style439
5.The postcolonial rereading of nineteenth-century realism444
5.1Realist fiction and the colonial “transformation of the world”445
5.2Realism and anti-colonialism453
6.Reading realism beyond the canon and across genres, media and discourses462
6.1Across media and genres463
6.2Realism, discourse history and the sciences466
7.Conclusion and outlook: Realism, naturalism and modernism474
Case studies
The French Debate about Gustave Courbet’s Pictorial Realism and the Dialogue between Literature and Art in the
Mid-Nineteenth Century489
Julien Zanetta
Russian Families, Accidental and Other503
Anne Lounsbery
The Benefit of Reading Marginal Forms: Dramatic monologue and ekphrastic poetry515
Rae Greiner
Madame Bovary in Italy: Forms of realism in the late
nineteenth-century Italian novel531
Olivia Santovetti
Eça and Machado: Money and adultery in lusophone realism551
Simão Valente
Zola, Realism and Naturalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Greece565
Sotirios Paraschas
The Polyphony of Late Nineteenth-Century Baltic Realism577
Benedikts Kalnačs
Chapter 5.Post-1900 Transformations of Realism597
Core Essay: Straw Man or Profligate Son? Transformations of literary realism since 1900599
Robert Weninger
1.The Lernaean hydra realism599
2.Post-1900 transformations of the realist Bildungsroman
603
2.1The realism of modernism in Joyce’s Ulysses
604
2.2Three twentieth-century reappropriations of the Bildungsroman
610
3.Reopening the book of history: The historical novel post-1900615
4.From social realism to socialist realism628
5.Pathologies of realism – adultery and beyond638
6.Modernism’s introspective turn649
6.1Stream of consciousness and interior monologue650
6.2The realism of surrealism662
7.Realism’s postmodern diversions666
7.1Realism within postmodernism: Two examples667
7.2Mapping a diverse field671
8.The returns of realism683
Case studies
Realism Across Borders: The role of state institutions in making Italian neo-realist film transnational697
Francesco Di Chiara
Paolo Noto
Realism in Play: The uses of realism in computer gaming discourse715
Paul Martin
Realism and Postcolonial Subjectivity in the Black British
Bildungsroman
735
Birgit Neumann
The Rise and Fall of Socialist Realism: The case of Christa Wolf751
Robert Weninger
Realism in Anglo-American Crime Fiction761
Simão Valente
Biographical Fiction’s Challenge to Realism: Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl and Alicia
Giménez Bartlett’s Una habitación ajena
775
Lucia Boldrini
Notes on contributors793
Index801
