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This article examines the representation of waste and re-use in a selection of 'mad housewife' novels of the late 1960s and 1970s in an effort to redress feminist critics' assessments of the genre as historically important but of dubious literary worth. Focussing on Anne Richardson Roiphe's Up the Sandbox!, Sheila Ballantyne's Norma Jean the Termite Queen, and Alix Kates Schulman's Memoirs of an Ex Prom-Queen, I argue that the novels in this genre enact their protagonists' departure from convention through the adoption of a fluid, collagistic structure that moves between temporal modes, narrative perspectives, and reality and fantasy, and through their incorporation of a range of external media (newspaper excerpts, recipes, advertising slogans) that 'mess up' the tidy structure of the popular realist novels that they seem, at first glance, to emulate. In their relentless attention to literal and figurative waste matter, and through the use of literary devices that defeat the attempt to bind the story within a linear narrative, Roiphe, Ballantyne, and Schulman create a carnivalesque disorder of both their protagonists' homes and the novel form. In examining these ideas, I seek to complicate existing accounts of waste in literature, including my own, and of 1960s and 70s countercultural writing, both of which remain heavily focused on writing by male authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plots of realist novels often conform with Aristotle’s view that literary works should exclude contingent events and relate what is ‘probable or necessary’. Authors such as Eliot and Zola claim to produce social-historical knowledge based on the plot’s mirroring of extra-textual causality. In such realism, chance events contribute (as in Hardy) to unitary meaning. Woolf is among the modernist inaugurators of a plot-free text that accommodates the ‘disconnected and incoherent’. Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual pursues this aim via formal devices (Oulipian ‘constraints’) that supplant plot as a structural basis, creating a paradoxically underdetermined space in which contingency can appear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the relationship between weird fiction and forms of realist practice. It argues that realism’s concerns with exteriority and detail make it peculiarly suitable for (and receptive to) ‘weirding’, a claim explored in readings of fiction by Robert Aickman (1914–1981) and M. John Harrison (b.1945). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay argues that Richard Ford's 2001 short story collection ‘A Multitude of Sins' is a specifically realist attempt to engage with and critique postmodernism. The difficulties inherent in such an attempt are suggested by the image of the fragmented body which occurs at key moments in the collection. Although the human body may appear to offer itself as substantial, realist alternative to the flimsiness of the postmodern image, this possibility is undermined by the fragmented and incoherent appearance of the ‘body in pieces’. The essay concludes that, confronted by the impasse implied by the fragmented body, Ford seeks a more effective alternative to postmodernism in a pragmatic notion of the self which has significant affinities with the theory of the self put forward in the early years of the twentieth century by George Herbert Mead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers the author's insights on interventions of literary realism in the essays of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. The author states that the essays "Mrs Dolloway," of Woolf and "Adam Bede," of Eliot are both concerned on the effects of character-making and story-making in ordinary life. The author also mentions that literary conventions are considered by both writers in bringing forward the characters which cannot be removed from reality.

The article presents abstracts on literary topics which include the realism of author Virginia Woolf, crime writing, and environment in literary naturalism in the novel "The Pit," by Frank Norris.

A correction to the article ""What Was That Thing She Was?" - Realism, Postmodernism and the Fragmented Body in Richard Ford's A Multitude of Sins" by I. McGuire that was published in a 2014 issue is presented.