Read more
"Realism and the Novel will be of interest to anyone who has found themselves absorbed in the world of a novel, analysing the form's ability to transport its readers to different times and places and describing distinct novelist traditions and the cultures as it travels across the globe"--
List of contents
Introduction: Realism and the Novel: A Global History Paul Stasi; Part I. The Realist Novel: A Timeline: 1. The eighteenth century Rebekah Mitsein; 2. The nineteenth century: England Ann Kornbluh; 3. The nineteenth century: France and its colonies Jennifer Yee; 4. The nineteenth century: America Mika Turim-Nygren; 5. Realism and modernism Paul Stasi; 6. Post-1945 realisms Matthew D Miller; Part II. Realism's Keywords: 7. Realism and the nation Patrick Parrinder; 8. Realism, liberalism and the subject Carolyn Lesjak; 9. Realism and sentiment Ulka Anjaria; 10. Realism and gender Ronjaunee Chatterjee; 11. Realism and race Rita Barnard; 12. Realism and sexuality Heather Love; Part III. Forms of Realism: 13. Realism and naturalism Andrew Hebard; 14. Magical realism Tavid Mulder; 15. Socialist realism Evgeny Dobrenko; 16. Proletarian realism Barbara Foley; 17. Capitalist realism Mathias Nilges; Part IV. Locations of Realism: 18. African-American realism Kenneth W. Warren; 19. Asian-American realism Christopher T. Fan; 20. Chicano/Latinx realism Nicole Eitzen Delgado; 21. Russian realism Priscilla Meyer; 22. Realism and Ireland Mary Mullen; 23. Latin American realism Kyle Proehl and Neil Larsen; 24. Caribbean realism Michael Niblett; 25. Realism and the African novel Josh Jewell and Madhu Krishnan; 26. Realism and the Indian novel Pranav Jani; 27. Realism and the Chinese novel Martin Huang; 28. Realism and the Arabic Novel Raya Alraddadi; 29. Realism and the Israeli novel Oded Nir.
About the author
Paul Stasi teaches twentieth-century Anglophone literature at SUNY Albany. He is the author of numerous essays and, most recently, of The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction (Cambridge 2022), which was shortlisted for the MSA 2023 Book Prize.
Summary
Realism and the Novel combines arguments about realism's emergence in the European eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with essays on its persistence throughout the world and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Moving away from a diffusionist account of culture – one where the realist novel is understood to have an autonomous national development in the West that then spreads across the globe – Realism and the Novel focuses, instead, on the ways the relationship between center and periphery informs both realism's origins and its continued relevance. At the same time, this collection takes seriously the semi-autonomy of literary form; the realist inheritance is not only an imposition. Rather, in its multiple incarnations, the realist novel has shown itself to be an exceptionally varied and multi-faceted form for representing the disparate social worlds of imperial modernity.
