Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction

Form vs. content, aesthetics vs. politics, modernism vs. realism: these entrenched binaries tend to structure work in early 20th century literary studies even among scholars who seek to undo them. The Persistence of Realism demonstrates how realism's defining concerns - sympathy, class, social determination - animate the work of Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Ralph Ellison. In contrast to the oft-told tale of an aesthetically rich modernism overthrowing realism's social commitments along with its formal structures, Stasi shows how these writers engaged with realism in concrete ways. The domestic novel, naturalist fiction, novels of sentiment, and industrial tales are realist structures that modernist fiction simultaneously preserves and subverts. Putting modernist writers in conversation with the realism that preceded them, The Persistence of Realism demonstrates how modernism's social concerns are inseparable from its formal ones.

List of contents

1. Fables of autonomy in Late James; 2. 'She will drown me with her': sympathy and autonomy in Joyce's Ulysses; 3. 'Innumberable slight changes': historical time and social reproduction in The Years; 4. 'I was always sentimental': Beckett's scenes of sympathy; 5. 'He forgot his history': Ellison's Naturalist Modernism.

About the author

Paul Stasi is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Albany. He is the author of Modernism, Imperialism and the Historical Sense (2012), the editor of Raymond Williams at 100 (2021), co-editor of The Last Western:  Deadwood and the End of American Empire (2013) and Ezra Pound in the Present (2016), along with numerous essays.

Summary

Designed for scholars of literature as well as readers of realist and modernist fiction, The Persistence of Realism provides new readings of works by James, Joyce, Woolf, Beckett and Ellison, showing how they were influenced by the realist writers that preceded them.

Product details

• Authors: Paul Stasi, Paul (University of Albany) Stasi, Stasi Paul
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.04.2024
• EAN: 9781009223164
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0922316-4
• No. of pages: 242
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Social and cultural history, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Gender studies, gender groups, Social classes, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Gender Identity