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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]

The most advanced forms of modernist and poststructuralist critique have been highly skeptical of the realist claims made by many 17th and 18th century novels as well as the more programmatic realism of 19th century. Yet from painting and novels to photography and virtual reality, countless techniques and technologies of representation have been developed to give readers or spectators an experience that is realistic. Indeed, "realistic" is almost always a positive epithet. This article seeks to explain the continued allure of realist fictional narratives by analyzing the four cardinal modes that compose them: mimesis, form, fictionality, and the reader. Each of these modes is necessary, and in their balanced cooperation are sufficient, to account for the analytical scope and affective engagement achieved by realist fictional narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the field of comparative literature stands to be reinvigorated by attention to two pressing questions. The first: what would a genuinely literary comparison of texts look like? And second: what would such a literary reading of diverse texts tell us about the grounds on which one undertakes a genuinely world-scale comparison, rather than one divided into "Europe and its others," or into the supposedly unrelated colonized regions of Africa and Asia? I answer these questions through the literary topography of the historical novel, which opens up a scope for world-scale comparison because of how multiple novels capture the moment of a region's entry into the modern world system. Together these novels provide a literary account of the entry of multiple colonized regions into capitalist time-space. I argue that the form of the historical novel, in particular its allegorical analytical realism, is central rather than incidental to this representation of capitalist expansion through two very different historical novels: C. S. Nyembezi's The Rich Man of Pietermaritzburg (1961), set in rural Zululand, South Africa, and Amitav Ghosh's The Sea of Poppies (2008), set in the region of the Indian Ocean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 1864 novella "Cousin Phillis" by Elizabeth Gaskell that talks about literary realism as an effect of feeling and an imitation of real life. Topics discussed include the novella reading as a first person narrator, nineteenth-century European realism, and the book "The Antinomies of Realism" by Fredric Jameson.

In this article, the author examines the short story collection "Main-Travelled Roads," by Hamlin Garland, to argue that regionalist literature was not necessarily anti-modern, and that Garland himself could be seen as an early American modernist author despite his attachment to the agrarian American Midwest. In this sense, the author contrasts Garland's realism with his alleged regionalism.

The article offers literary criticism of the novel "Great Expectations," by Charles Dickens. The author focuses on the concept of optative mood, a form of self-understanding, and examines how the theme of incomplete lives is evident within the novel. Other topics explored include the themes of identity, realism, and embodiment.

Discusses George Eliot's admiration for the `realistic,' and examines the implications of the discourse and the possible fissurings of it in text of her novel `Middlemarch' in a way that involves returning to the novelist/doctor analogy as it appears first in chapter 15. Compares the novel with Michel Foucault's `The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception' (1963).