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This essay proposes that we understand Vernon Lee's debut novel, Miss Brown (1884), as enacting a theory of literary language's constructive potency that Lee develops in her critical essays. Those critical essays offer a vibrant nineteenth-century formalism, suggesting how fiction constructs and formalizes our realities, shaping readers' mental and emotional circuits as it arranges phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In Miss Brown, Lee crafts a prose style that meticulously tracks the protagonist's formation--the "little dramas of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment, . . . of tensions and relaxations"--rendering that formation as a drama of sentence-level structuration. The resulting "representation" of Anne Brown is interrupted with adjective-rich stretches conspicuously geared toward defining, formulating, and theorizing what is being represented, essay-like. By treating the protagonist as an occasion to foreground syntax's active building and abstracting, Miss Brown's prose partakes in the kind of literary practice that has recently been described as nonmimetic realism--realism that does more than denote and refer and reflect what is, and instead performs, meditating on form's process, to project and inform new potentialities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is usually approached as a representative text in the American realist mode and an unambiguous expression of Howells's disdain for--in Walter Benn Michaels's words--''the excesses of capitalism,'' especially as embodied in the novel's rendering of ''the greedy and heartless stock market.'' Like many commentators of the period, Howells promoted a traditional view of honest industry against the emerging phenomenon of speculative finance, and yet to read the novel as an allegory of opposition to Wall Street speculation is to oversimplify Howells's complicated attitudes toward high finance and to make a caricature out of the novel's treatment of complex economic developments. In this essay, I reassess Silas's investment career and the novel's surprisingly dense engagement with the dynamics of securities trading as a form of commerce. Critics such as Michaels and Neil Browne have contended that through Silas's failed investment career, Howells ''attempts to disarticulate ... an emergent market ethos,'' but as I read the novel this same ''market ethos'' is inseparable from Howells's conception of realism and of the vocation of the literary realist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents literary criticism of the book "Belinda" by Maria Edgeworth. Particular focus is given to the novel's engagement with realism. According to the author, the book used allusions to stage performances, acting practices, and dramatic histories to construct a sense of reality. It is suggested that in Edgeworth's time, the theater was considered a better source of realism than the sentimental genre of the novel. Details on Edgeworth's work as a playwright are also presented.

An essay is presented discussing the ways in which William Dean Howells used instant photography to subvert positivist theories in literature in the 19th century. It describes Howells' book "London Films" and Howells' attempt to portray the authentic through photography, Howells' efforts to undermine the literary theories of author William James, and the influence of the literary genres of realism and naturalism on Howells' work.

The article discusses the book "A Hazard of New Frontiers," which is a realist novel by William Dean Howells, and how it relates to 19th-century American law and literature. The state's authority in relation to social and economic coercion of the public, the diffusion of political agency, the appropriate boundaries between the state and the individual, the book "The Novel and the Police" by D. A. Miller, the book "The Unwritten Constitution of the United States" by Christopher G. Tiedeman, and laissez-faire legal arguments in U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning constitutional law are discussed.

The article discusses the perception of light in literature and how Thomas Hardy used the phenomenon in his novels to represent subjectivity. The technique for presenting the distortion, occlusion, and illumination of light in Hardy's books "Desperate Remedies," "Jude the Obscure," and "The Well-Beloved" is discussed. The parallel artistic and literary styles of the painter J. M. W. Turner and Hardy, the observation of light in literature and art, literary realism and metaphor, and the scientific character of light are also discussed.

William Dean Howells was committed to determining what would inspire people from different economic, political, and religious backgrounds to imagine each other as respected members of a human community. Scholars have debated whether his realist aesthetic was suited to do that. Some have argued that realism works to contain the lower classes, and others have argued that it portrays a heterogeneous society in which social problems can be solved through human negotiation between the middle classes and others. Scholars have not, however, addressed how Howells performs the necessary shift in his fiction from a space in which characters focus on their own interests to a space in which they seek to enact justice through negotiating with disparate people. This article identifies and names what enacts the necessary shift: the literary device of accident. In Howells's fiction chance meetings, feelings of accidental connection, and injuries during travel force his middle-class characters into understanding labor politics, slum dwellers, and morally compromised millionaires. His use of accident changes over time, from The Undiscovered Country (1880) to Annie Kilburn (1889) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). This essay traces that change in order to reflect on the democratic and antidemocratic implications of Howells's realist aesthetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]