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This essay centers around a comparative reading of William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes and Frank Norris's McTeague. Its main goal is to contextualize Norris's attempts to promote what he understood to be literary naturalism—positioned against the "well-behaved ordinary bourgeois" realism of Howells—and to show how he connected the idea of 'the literary' to the postbellum world of professional labor. In as much as other established professions already regulated the practice of work according to internally ratified standards of quality postbellum writers too sought to render the practice of writing objectifiable by appeal to standards of evaluation that were approved by experts within their own community a "brotherhood of novelists" in the words of James. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title character of Sabbath's Theater (1995) is a noted iconoclast. Most treatments of Sabbath's character attempt to reconcile his social deviance with his traumatic past--the death of his brother in war, his lover to cancer, and his first wife in absentia. Implied in these readings is a surprising truth about Sabbath: he is, despite himself, a traditionalist. This essay argues that Sabbath (like Roth) is committed to the conventions of literary realism, but this commitment is tested throughout the novel; realist techniques continually fail to address Sabbath's grief, revealing their aesthetic and affective limits. Sabbath's Theater is thus a sustained critique of the very form in which it is written--an airing of grievances with literary realism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Asian literature has a history of engaging with ecocriticism and environmentalism from a postcolonial, locally specific perspective. New materialism shares this ecocritical commitment through its posthumanist conceptions of embodiment and material entanglement between human and nonhuman material agencies. Despite their common interest in alternative possibilities for human and nonhuman engagement, new materialism and South Asian literature have rarely come into meaningful contact with each other. My article seeks to bring both fields together by examining Kiran Desai's novel Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard from a new materialist perspective, in which human and nonhuman characters interact with each other in imagining posthumanist possibilities of being in the world. I mobilise Karen Barad's agential realist theory and Stacy Alaimo's concept of trans-corporeality to argue that Desai's light-hearted comic satire raises important questions about environmental and human exploitation. Examinations of the local, national, global, and historical aspects of India's material reality reveal the agential realist nature of human and nonhuman interactions within the novel's rural postcolonial context. This reading expands the scope of new materialism into South Asian literature and furthers the possibility of using new materialist theory to engage with ecocriticism from a postcolonial perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Literature / Primerjalna Književnost is the property of Slovenian Comparative Literature Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay argues that Ben Lerner's novel 10:04 (2014) employs "implicated realism" to represent the environmentalism of the rich. Implicated realism is a self-reflexive aesthetic that reveals how the foundations of literary realism—narrative description, bourgeois settings, an emphasis on daily life—rely upon the forms of exploitation that have also produced the climate crisis. I demonstrate that implicated realism in 10:04 , paradoxically, consists of both hyperrealism and realist failure. Lerner's novel applies hyperrealist description to seemingly innocuous scenes, uncovering their implication in the uneven distribution of environmental harm. Such hyperrealism exists alongside realist failure, which 10:04 both thematizes and performs. Through realist failure, then, implicated realism confronts the compromised history of realism and its association with possessive individualism and extractive capitalism. Consequently, although many ecocritics discount realism's ability to represent climate change, this essay identifies implicated realism as a self-reflexive and adaptive mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid mounting discourse on contemporary literary realism in international academia, Wang Shouren, a leading Chinese scholar of foreign literature stands out as a championing figure in marshalling the recent academic turn to realism in China. In the past few decades, he has made unremitting endeavor towards constructing a systematic body of knowledge regarding literary realism. Weaving his way through voluminous scholarship on realism and histories of the 20th century and contemporary literature, he proposes a set of keywords (truth, mimesis, reality, fiction) and pathways (cognitive, aesthetic, affective, intermedial) to set up the theoretic foundation of realism for more meaningful academic exploration. At the same time, being a historian of postwar foreign literature, he teases out a steady strain of realism running through a variety of postmodern literary texts--first mainly sourced from postwar Anglo-American literature and later from a much wider scope of world literature including contemporary Chinese authors. As a result, Wang Shouren's outlook on realism extends both along the global and local axes towards a glocalized perception of literary realism as a pluralistic form open to proliferation and permutation in the remapping of the world literary system. In particular, his Chinese identity equips him with a distinct Chinese scope of view which consists in Chinese perspective, Chinese stance, Chinese insights and Chinese resources, enabling him to be an outstanding spokesperson for realism's contemporary manifestations in world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes Roberto Rossellini's Europa '51 (1952), a film Gilles Deleuze made famous for its way of "seeing convicts" in a range of social institutions, including the factory, the bourgeois family, and the psychiatric hospital. Recent accounts of Rossellini's career have tended to emphasize his role in manufacturing narratives of postwar national innocence. By contrast, this essay reads Europa '51 as offering a critique of the carceral state, though one that knows itself to be contained, disempowered, and confined. Mindful of the limits of this critique, the essay brings Rossellini's film into conversation with ongoing debates about "reparative reading" and its alternatives. Noting that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick encounters, or rather avoids, a "deinstitutionalized person on the street" in "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," this essay highlights the film's very different understanding of institutionalization, which anticipates the demystifying and consistently anticarceral critique of official psychiatry that would emerge in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas the fantasies sustaining Italian neorealism were reparative, the essay argues, Rossellini's critical and self-critical turns in Europa '51 take viewers beyond repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-1989 Hungary, as the superstructure of a wellestablished censorship rapidly collapsed, a huge wave of formerly restricted information refreshed the stagnant water of literary and social culture. Nevertheless, the mainstream of contemporary highbrow belles-lettres began to take a rather apolitical approach towards literary production. Realism as an objectivist literary style and referential mode of representation was felt, after 1989, as too ideological, and thus lost its credibility along with the grand narrative of state socialism. A postmodern canon was soon established and popularized, based on formal experimentation and on the non-referential nature of the literary work. Despite the fact that postmodernism generally rejected realist fiction, Hungarian post-communist mainstream writers felt compelled to address the memory of the communist past. This paper aims to investigate major ethical and aesthetical problems of telling the truth via fiction, focusing on seminal books like The Union Jack, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, and Dossier K. by Imre Kertész; as well as Celestial Harmonies and Javított kiadás (Revised Edition) by Péter Esterházy. Last but not least, the article will analyse the compelling piece Egy történet (A/One Story), written by both the aforementioned authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Iberoamericana (Liverpool University Press) is the property of Liverpool University Press / Journals and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The present research aims to explain symbolic realism in literary texts by reviewing and critically examining symbolic realism, while explaining three important aspects of symbolic realism epistemology. For this purpose, the possibility of connecting realism with anti-realism and presentationism in symbolic realism and the semantic system of symbolic realism was investigated in three parts of the situational context of symbolic realism. Symbolic realism is known as both an artistic technique and a style. Since the term "symbolic realism" is not properly recognized in literary and artistic circles of Iran, the necessity of this research was felt. As a result, symbolic realism grew in contexts where the connection between language and reality became more prominent and, on the other hand, symbols were used simultaneously with the departure from photographic realism. Another thing is that the possibility of interaction between realism and anti-realism was investigated, the result is that in the studied periods, we can witness the influence of realism from anti-realism and presentationism in the use of symbolic realism, although these links can be traced, but symbolic realism itself maintains an independent structure. It passes through the dry and monotonous approach of pure realism and achieves a broad and multi-meaning system. In the third part, while confirming and explaining the polysemous system of symbolic realism, its difference with other polysemous systems was determined and the position of the symbol in symbolic realism was analyzed. It goes further and an independent semantic pattern can be drawn for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kyoko Takanashi's book, "Limited Access: Transport Metaphors and Realism in the British Novel, 1740-1860," explores the role of transportation and communication in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. Takanashi challenges the assumption that novels about travel always promote connectivity, highlighting the gaps and exclusions that can occur within transportation networks. The book examines various modes of transportation, such as stagecoaches and railways, and their metaphorical significance in works by authors like Fielding, Sterne, Dickens, and Thackeray. Takanashi also explores the role of memory and mediation in literary realism. Overall, "Limited Access" offers a nuanced analysis of the relationship between transportation, reading, and meaning-making in British novels of the time period. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines Ralph Barton Perry's analysis of the 'ego-centric predicament'. It will be shown that Perry convincingly argued against prevailing contemporary versions of idealism and that it makes perfectly good sense to consider him a precursor of subsequent trends in American analytic philosophy. Perry's appraisal and promotion of the contemporary logic of relations in the framework of early twentieth-century American neorealism provides further evidence of his being a proto-analytic philosopher. His personal acquaintance with Bertrand Russell proved instructive in this regard. On the whole, Perry's distinctive approach to philosophy was instrumental in establishing the analytic style of reasoning in the United States. This paper is devoted to substantiating this claim. It is thus hoped that a clearer picture of early twentieth-century American philosophy will begin to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Alea: Estudos Neolatinos is the property of Programa da Pos-Graduacao em Letras Neolatinas Fac de Letras - UFRJ and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines George Eliot's poetry and its relationship to her prose. While some critics argue that her poetry lacks the transcendent quality of true poetry, the article suggests that Eliot's poetry is informed by idealist aesthetics and aims to transcend the boundaries of prose writing. It explores Eliot's knowledge of various theories of art and her idealist conception of the genesis of art in her biblical poem "The Legend of Jubal." The article also suggests that Eliot's understanding of poetry is influenced by German Idealist philosophers like Hegel. Overall, Eliot's poetry seeks to unite feeling and thought, form and content, in order to embody higher truth and achieve a deeper understanding of reality. [Extracted from the article]

This introduction situates the contributions to the New Agenda in the context of an apparent resurgence of the term 'provincial' and 'provincialism' in Britain since the Brexit debates and the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. It takes the resurgence of provincial thinking as an invitation to explore the cultural history of provincialism in Victorian Britain and the unexpected part it played in the formation of Empire. By revaluing the cultural formation of provincialism through this historical lens the articles in this New Agenda help us see the roots of its power now and the alternative possibilities latent within it. Although provincialism emerged as a fraught and politically charged term during the nineteenth century it was also a means to expand access to print and material cultures to those previously excluded. At the same time as provincialism became a pejorative term in the hands of liberal critics such as Matthew Arnold, nineteenth-century Britain was powered by industry, intellectual enquiry, and newspapers emanating from non-metropolitan towns and cities. The provincial press and provincial fiction are crucial ways in which Victorian Britain represented itself as an entity composed of distinctive constituent regions and imagined itself as an imperial power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of German Life & Letters is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article we make a case for a synchronic and contextualizing perspective on the scaling of literary data, one which qualifies and expands the data points in terms of depth, or thickness, through the help of metadata on the social and historical conditions of the texts. Our case study is an investigation of the rise and impact of realism in a corpus of more than 800 Danish and Norwegian novels from 1870 to 1899 with three, interlocking critical and methodological aims. We use textual features to model realism in a large corpus of Danish‐language novels. We compare the features driving that model to the ones that were important to the historical and critical development of realism as a literary project. And we use the results of our model to study the interplay between realism and social history. Our findings suggest that realism was more prominent and more widely distributed in Danish‐language novels of the late nineteenth century than the critical tradition has usually acknowledged. Women appear to have written realist fiction not only at rates similar to men, but at times and with features that are difficult to distinguish from their male counterparts. The article relies on—and insists on further—dialogue between digital and analog approaches to the exploration of cultural data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing Asian American abolition feminisms is a practice not only of politics, organizing, and struggle, but of imagination, and speculative fiction and poetry can work to inspire and sustain such imaginations. Speculative and experimental works also challenge conventions of literary realism in Asian American literature, opening generic and imaginative possibilities for Asian American feminist politics. Responding to the threats of police violence and of racialized violence against Asian North American women, Franny Choi's queer feminist cyborg poetics open space beyond the violences of the human, and Kai Cheng Thom's Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir bends space and time to join trans women's community together in ease and safety. Vandana Singh's utopias of the third kind locate utopic thinking in the struggles of oppressed and racialized people to build and sustain community through slowness and connection. Together, these speculations consider Asian American feminist futurities and what ways of being-otherwise we can share in the present and future, shaped by connection, community, and care, rather than urgency, scarcity, and fear. Analyzing how these works respond to violence and crisis, this article describes abolitionist possibilities for Asian American feminisms that respond to anti-Asian and state violence by seeking other genres of human life and rejecting linear notions of progress. Instead, these texts cultivate connection and community in the present as a project of shaping Asian American utopic visions, rethinking utopia not as a vision of future perfection, but an ethic of embracing and negotiating change, difference, and multiplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Haddis Alemayehu's classic novel ፍቅር እስከ መቃብር (Fikir iske Mekabir , Love until Death , 1958 Ethiopian Calendar, 1965/6 Gregorian Calendar), is lauded by critics as a pioneering realist and modern novel in the Amharic literary tradition. My aim in this article is to scrutinize this take by examining the novel's narrative temporalities and modes through a dialectical lens. This leads me to argue that the novel's realism is marked by contradiction and fluidity. Specifically, the emergence of realism in Fikir iske Mekabir is accompanied by its breakdown while the realist narrative mode is accompanied by the traditional narrative modes of epic and hagiography (or, gedl). This hitherto unexamined textual and intertextual quality of Haddis's novel reveals new insights into its thematic content regarding modernity, tradition, and social reproduction under the old Ethiopian order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the resurgence of interest in Georg Lukács, a Hungarian philosopher and literary theorist, following his marginalization during the postmodernism era. It discusses Lukács's various transformations and reinventions throughout his lifetime and reflects on his legacy in academia and public discourse, particularly celebrating the centennial of his influential work "History and Class Consciousness" (1923).

A literary criticism of the book "Dombey and Son" by Charles Dickens is presented which focuses on significance of hat wearing, hat etiquette, and its role in gender performance and social differentiation. It explores how hats symbolize identity, class, and gender, examining their implications in Victorian society through detailed analysis of various characters' headgear.

The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns have been written by The Afghan-American author, "Khaled Hosseini" in 2003 and 2007, respectively. In his work, political, social and cultural situation of Afghanistan are of utmost mportance, and the themes of friendship and family relations, love and betrayal, courage and fear, war and rape and migration are highlighted. In addition to using strong realistic components such as expressing social and historical facts, typical characterization, detailed description of personalities and environments, naturalistic components such as disaster and ugliness, inheritance and environment algebra, sexual issues, and the use of characters Static and passive naturalism have also been noticed. It is also noteworthy that, in both novels, betrayal and rape are the two themes that are initially presented. Concerns such as civil and foreign wars and ethnic strife are a part of Afghanistan's history. The first novel, therefore, is realistic, however, the author’s focus on these issues and ignoring other aspects of life, escaping the problems for which no solution is provided, taking refuge in the safe haven of the West, strengthens the naturalistic aspect of this novel. The most important reason for the presence of naturalistic components in such novels is the unsettled political situation of Afghanistan in the time period of the story. In the second novel, with the war ending and Afghanistan reviving, the element of hope is evident. Considering the historical background of Afghanistan, it is assumed that, despite the naturalistic aspects, a strong realist dimension is still remained in Khaled Hosseini’s work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O'Brien's nonsense prose in "At Swim-Two-Birds" and "The Third Policeman" reveals how his cyclical narratives draw several fictional levels and styles together as a basic principle of the novels' structure. O'Brien employed literary conventions in using the novel form but did so in a manner that results in a defamiliarization of the common ideas of fiction, character, and authorship. He turns the novel, a literary form, into a textual circus that opposes literary realism, revealing novel writing itself to be "a self-evident sham." This article explores how O'Brien's nonsense portraits of rebellious characters and his playing with structure unsettle the boundaries of fiction and reality. The article discusses the formation of a mosaic text that consistently undermines the possibility of an objective representation of reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A radical identification predicated on unlikeness: this is how Leo Bersani understands the singular mode of desiring that Emily Brontë invents in her incomparable novel. With Catherine and Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights offers new "forms of being," untethered to the world (of society, of romance, of realism). For Bersani, Catherine and Heathcliff exist more on the order of gravitational forces than characters in any conventional novelistic sense. This essay explores Bersani's provocative treatment of Wuthering Heights with a particular focus on his practice of reading, one that "extracts" distinctive and "devouring" forces of desire and as yet unrealized forms of being from a novel far removed from the dominant modes of narrative realism. Bersani's reading of Brontë—first published in 1976 and his only excursion into British Romanticism—prompts a thought experiment: to imagine a Bersani limit-place Romanticism, quite unlike any available version, a Romanticism of "unqualified negativity" and "aspiring openness" with an eye and an ear to unknown pleasures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes a poetological approach to the thematising of everyday life and its connections with the poetics of the "effect of the real". Methodologically, it is part of the research concept of the new poetics. On the material of a canonical text of Slovak literary realism -- the novella "Neprebudený" ([The unawakened] 1886) by Martin Kukučín (1860 -- 1928) --, it identifies poetological characteristics of the novella, reveals its existential parameters, and points to the place of M. Kukučín in the ironic-polemical line of modern Slovak prose. This innovative approach allows for identification in the structure of the text the tradition of the poetics of grotesque realism as conceptualised by M. M. Bakhtin on the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the literature of the European Renaissance. The identification of elements of the poetics of the grotesque in the text of the novella is based on the emphasis of this poetics on the shape/surface of the phenomena of the life world, especially the human body. Therefore, the starting point of the interpretation of the novella as outlined here is description as the basic stylistic procedure of realistic texts -- the description of the character in this case. The description and subsequent interpretation of the image of the grotesque body makes it possible to identify the presence of the poetics of discrete irony as a key strategy of authorial narration in the text of the novella. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Emile Habiby's The Pessoptimist (1974) reinvented the Palestinian novel within a new literary genre, post-realism. Habiby's masterpiece employs a complex, noncommittal narrative that in many ways defies, even eludes understanding, and this is its strength. In order to make the narrative more approachable, this paper attempts to contextualise the novel within a postmodern sub-genre, post-realism, making its more subtle and hidden meanings and dimensions reveal themselves. To this end, the article begins by defining realism and post-realism as literary terms and then pinpoints several key post-realist moments in this highly elusive novel. To deepen the analysis, narrative strategies employed in the novel are compared and contrasted to a similar postmodernist novel, Ralph Waldo Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). Ultimately, the article contributes to developing a new sub-genre, post-realism, within the main, mother genre of postmodernism, which can not only be seen as a reinvention of the Palestinian novel, but also be used widely in literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will explore the many different realisms of John le Carré's work, from the legacy of Nineteenth Century literary realism to the distinct tradition of "spy realism" that defined itself against the "spy romance" format epitomized by James Bond. Finally, this article will argue that le Carré's works challenged dominant historiographies of the Cold War. In doing so, le Carré's fictions pose questions to historians about the ways in which we understand and conceptualize the so-called "real world of espionage", and wider political, diplomatic, social and cultural currents it is intertwined with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Realism movement of 19th century Western literature is a significant literary phenomenon with far-reaching influence on global literary history. In the context of Chinese literature and culture, it holds a preeminent position due to its depth and extent. Nevertheless, the meaning and reception of Realism has been a subject of considerable controversy, complexity, and variation. Professor Jiang Chengyong's latest publication, Research on Western Literary Trends in the 19th Century Vol. 2: Realism, adopts an innovative academic perspective and employs cutting-edge ideas and methods to undertake a thorough examination and interpretation of this literary trend. The book aims to uncover the original features of Realism and put forward a set of innovative perspectives that substantially enrich and expand the existing body of research in this field in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary realism has produced some of the most famous deaths in literary fiction. Psychological insight into the characters' experiences and the mental states that induced their deaths helps readers to engage the protagonists not as victims of society, martyrs of fate, or wicked characters but, rather, as pathological human beings. Their psychological dualities bring affirmations of identity as well as breakdowns of identity, hence transforming readers' judgments on their morality with new understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary realism has produced some of the most famous deaths in literary fiction. Psychological insight into the characters' experiences and the mental states that induced their deaths helps readers to engage the protagonists not as victims of society, martyrs of fate, or wicked characters but, rather, as pathological human beings. Their psychological dualities bring affirmations of identity as well as breakdowns of identity, hence transforming readers' judgments on their morality with new understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Itinerários - Revista de Literatura is the property of Itinerarios - Revista de Literatura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Although many literary critics have tried to prove that there is only one Brontë and that is Emily Brontë, who was a genius among the other two sisters, many readers are of the opinion that the three sisters, Emily, Charlotte, and Anne have written novels of the same type but with varying success. This assumption is natural and reasonable, because life gave them the same inclination to write, while they, as sisters, were closely related to each other at home and in the family. For the student and the critic, the case of these three sisters is challenging, because life seldom gives the same tendency to the three who were of the same blood and of the same generation, and who wrote novels of the same form, but relying in three different experiences (Long, 514-515). The novel "Wuthering Heights" is a kind of tragedy in the framework of realism, a work which, through concretely and convincingly presented characters of a place and time, speaks about the all-human and eternal theme: about the conflict of the free energy of the human being with conventions and codes and material interests that prevent it. The composition of this novel is its best artistic feature. To write the novel, Emily starts from the end of the events. Looking back, she unfolds the events first through the testimony of the witnesses and then through the narrator. Thus, none of the narrators is a tool of the novel's technique, but they give the impression that they are living people with different qualities and characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Slavica Litteraria is the property of Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay examines Jane Austen's occasional but potent attention to singular moments that seem to stand outside of the usual flow of time. Signaled by her use of phrases such as 'the work of a moment' or 'the work of an instant', these momentous moments gain resonance when studied against the backdrop of Austen's nuanced attention to temporal representation in narrative and to the temporal dimensions of human experience. The essay argues that Austen's momentous moments ultimately function as a crucial dimension of what Amit Yahav in Feeling Time designates the 'sensibility chronotope', a perspective that asserts primacy over chronometry and chronology. Attending to these moments in the fiction further enables us to assess Austen's contribution to what would later become a distinctive feature of the nineteenth-century realist novel, the preoccupation with roads not taken and 'lives unled', as Andrew Miller argues in On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics agree that Don Quixote helped originate realism, but its influence on nineteenth-century novels has been widely misunderstood. Realist Quixotism, usually assumed to oppose book and world, in fact models a dynamic imbrication of fictionality and reality. Thus, it helps bridge the normative and utopian functions of literary realism. This concept of realism is both exemplified and theorized by Anthony Trollope's novels, which insist on the mutual construction of literary and social convention. Their metaleptic narration, Victorian marriage plots, and use of the everyday illustrate how metafictionality, counterintuitively, can help construct a sense of the realistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Thélème is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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Africa's history and ecology were shaped by colonization. The European invasion of eastern nations had a significant influence on the environment. The technical advancements due to colonization have been both beneficial and detrimental to the colonized countries. The harmful consequences have prompted several researchers and African writers to conduct a critical examination of the interaction between humans and their environment in terms of race, culture, economy, power, and belonging. Ben Okri is an internationally acclaimed poet, writer, artist, and public speaker. In his trilogies The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment, and Infinite Riches Okri has depicted the repercussions of colonization and the process of decolonization on the individual and the environment in order to understand the African reality. This paper highlights the interconnection of nature and culture which is considered as one of the main tenets of African culture and tradition. Okri employs magical realism as a literary method to emphasize the interplay between the human and natural worlds. Okri has included vivid imagery of verdant forest that has been deforested and wounded. According to the Yoruba mythology, the forest is frequently associated with magic and the supernatural world, in keeping with West African customs. Therefore, the exploitation of the natural world has led to the abandonment of traditional values which is well depicted. Further, the paper attempts to examine the effect of colonialism in eroding the spirit world and the physical world in terms of social structure and the degrading culture and its relationship with the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James Jones’s second war trilogy, “The Thin Red Line” (1962), sketches the comic cycle of infantrymen undeterred by the relentless battles of Guadalcanal. In the name of bravery, Jones’s characters refuse to suffer by veiling their cowardice, insecurities, and anxieties under a burst of nervous laughter. In his mission to offer a verisimilar description of the Pacific struggle, Jones interrupts the bleak realism of his literary canon by carnivalesque episodes of combat festivals filled with tough humor at the act of killing and the spectacle of death. The aim behind this technique is to ridicule the tedious routine of military life, in particular, and war, in general. Most importantly, his narrative style conceals through laughter the traumas of his soldiers by offering a temporary therapy to their combat stress. Thus, “The Thin Red Line” does not only show Jones’s antiwar stance but also his endeavor to create characters who repress their anxieties to resist the pain inflicted by a higher order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Il serpente, Luigi Malerba's first novel, the writer moves from the objectifying perspective, working-class protagonists, and themes of neorealism to a subjective realism that sets aside the direct dialogue of his first book (La scoperta dell'alfabeto, a collection of brief narratives) in favor of the exterior monologue. The narrating voice of Il serpente feels compelled to relive the guilt, shame, and humiliation of his youth. He prevaricates habitually because he is anxious as to how he appears, primarily to himself: he is caught between the need to express himself and the fear of being punished for having done so. The changes in narrative strategy, along with the psychological plausibility of the narrative and Malerba's analysis of Italy's 'grey zone', populated by those who did not actively participate in the civil war following the fall of Fascism, make Il serpente worthy of our close attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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By concluding her study with Kafka's anti-realist novel, Weitzman emphasizes the broader aesthetic claims that exceed the confines of realism. Reading Holz's I Papa Hamlet i (1889) and his little known I Die Blechschmiede i (1902) together, Weitzman shows how the previously hidden leitmotif of obscenity in realism becomes crystal clear in naturalism. Even though Benn's writing comes closest to what we today commonly understand as obscenity, Weitzman reads his poetry as "fake" naturalism (136), simply evoking truth rather than the plain objectivity that naturalism purports to proffer. [Extracted from the article]

Over the course of the book's six chapters, organized in a diachronic arc that extends from Stifter to Kafka, Weitzman lucidly and meticulously unpacks these claims, showing how literary realism might well be the quintessential poetic form organized around the "suspicion of the material world" (8) as well as the drive to administer and control it. The final three chapters of the book provide opportunities to examine the extensions and aftereffects of realism's attempts to mediate reality. And yet, as Fontane's novella suggests, sublimation is only premised on the continuous reenactment of violence and reemergence of reified matter. [Extracted from the article]