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The article explores the character of Alice Staverton in Henry James's "The Jolly Corner," portraying her as a midwife figure who assists the protagonist, Spencer Brydon, in his rebirth as an American businessman. Alice's role as a spiritual mediator and guide is compared to archetypes of feminine devotion, adding depth and complexity to her character. Through Alice's support and encouragement, Brydon undergoes a transformative experience, symbolizing a second chance at life and redemption. [Extracted from the article]

This article positions Akwaeke Emezi's novel Freshwater (2018) as a text that challenges definitions of multiple genres, namely literary realism and speculative fiction. I argue that Freshwater's seemingly fantastical elements are in fact iterations of Igbo cosmology, which recognizes coterminous human and spiritual realms as part of material reality. By positioning Igbo ontology as the grounding principle of earthly existence, Freshwater contests the division of realism into multiple subsets (magical, animist, literary). Furthmore, I argue that the novel playfully refigures ogbanje identities and Igbo cosmological structures to envision new horizons for future kinship. Rather than speculating about futures that respond to African histories of European colonization, Freshwater reconfigures uniquely Igbo concepts such as ogbanje and iyi-uwa into means for queer agential re-destination. Thus, the novel shifts the speculative focus away from postcolonial efforts to "write back," and instead locates the basis for speculative futures within Igbo ontological structures. Freshwater's complex navigation of not only multiple realisms and speculative fiction, but also tradition and change, defies easy categorization and instead offers open-ended avenues for queer Igbo and other African futurities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

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Realism lingered quite long in Turkish literature. From the 1900s onwards, realism and naturalism were prominent movements. If the often-despised detective novels are put aside, there was hardly any room for the extraordinary in fiction. During the socialist realism era, realism almost became the sole movement and was strong until the 1950s. Despite the appearance of the first modern literature from that time on, it kept its prominent position until the 1970s. What realism skillfully pushed outside the literature were the supernatural, the magic, the extraordinary, the mythical, and the fairy-tale-inspired narration. However, these elements made a comeback in the 1980s and quickly spread in the 2000s. Today, almost all fiction comprises these elements, and this time not in the form of the despised "B-literature," but in a very mainstream way. Today, the fantastic, detective novels, historical/biographical fiction and science fiction of all sorts are living their golden age. Often fused with myths, fairy-tales, epics, and such, this new type of fiction is like a scene where the supernatural has made its glorious comeback. In this paper, I will show the different ways and forms of this comeback in two novels: The Stories of Efrasiyab by İhsan Oktay Anar and The Red Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk. Analyzing these novels based on their approach to the supernatural, I will try to show how myths and reality mix, what type of novel universe they create, and what this new reality stands for in the postmodern times we live in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Sand's Indiana and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth share a guiding interest in the function of appearances that--considered within the context of literary realism's development--can be seen as contributing to the gradually dominating trope of exteriority in which fictional characters' identities and actions are ineluctably determined and defined by such external forces as society, language, aesthetics, and commerce. The failure of Sand's Raymon de Ramière and Wharton's Lily Bart to realize themselves as independently empowered individuals exemplifies literary realism's reassessment, closely tied to the rise of sociology as a discipline, of the longstanding, romantic tradition of a person's potential to be a selfdetermining entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

The article examines Döblin's novelistic treatment of geographical information with regard to China. By means of sketches and choice quotations, proof was found that Döblin not only adopted findings by Ferdinand Baron von Richthofen, but implicitly stressed the German geographer's intention to utilise China's large coal deposits for colonial interests. The example of the Nan‐ku mountains, where in the novel the political/religious movement of the 'Truly Weak' alliance first formed itself, serves to examine how Döblin makes use of geological and historical facts from von Richthofen's scientific studies. This reveals itself, for instance, in his only slightly differing description of the Nan‐ku mountain range from what von Richthofen had noted. In its attempted exactitude, the former notion can be considered a typical feat of literary Realism. We also further examine the crucial role this much sought‐after Chinese mineral wealth – coal – plays in the later rebellious upheaval. Our results contradict the current notion that Döblin depicted a historically divested, contrapuntal view of China as compared to the Western Hemisphere. Instead, the novel markedly deals with real geographical, social and political facts about China in the colonial era. A merely expressionist view on Döblin's novel does not seem to hold. [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]

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]

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).

Insurgency, kidnap for ransom, banditry, herdsmen-farmers clash, and gruesome killing of individuals have become quotidian security realities in contemporary Nigeria. Scholarly approach to this concern has often resulted in criticism domiciled only at leadership while neglecting the role of the followership in this security predicament. This paper is therefore designed to examine the representations of the complicity of the people in insecurity using Femi Osofisan’s Aringindin and the Nightwatchmen (2002) as a case study. The investigation combines a deliberate look at the dramaturgical devices employed by Osofisan to enhance this representation. Georg Lukacs’s theory of literary realism and Achille Mbembe’s model of the Postcolonial theory are adopted as the framework for the study to unravel the complicity of the people. At the same time, the method applied is the interpretive design and the socio-artistic approach to literary criticism. Osofisan deploys dramatic metaphor, aesthetics of masking, Orunmila motif, and Satire to unmask the villains who mystify efforts to address insecurity and throw the state in a nightmare. The revelations are incredible even as vigilantism is deconstructed. The play points attention to the need to carefully examine proposals on ending insecurity in Nigeria while also contributing to emerging scholarship on investigating the followers with regards to their contribution to their disillusionment.

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.

This paper examines how the Victorian ghost-story genre troubles realist visions of memory as a store of immutable past experiences. Analyses of ghost stories by Ellen Wood, Amelia B. Edwards, Dinah Mulock, and George MacDonald reveal that they portray memory as constructed, biased, and fallible. Through first-person and frame narratives, these stories illustrate how the act of recollection falsifies memories by reshaping them to better fit affective narrative arcs, thus depicting a form of nostalgic memory that foregrounds feeling at the cost of accuracy. Yet, even as these ghost stories highlight the impossibility of truly accurate recollection, their focus on traumatic events emphasizes the felt imperative to accurately recall and communicate emotional experiences. [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]

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]

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]

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]

Introduction “Literature is a mirror of all events, rituals, behaviors, efforts and ideas of a society, which is the current language and identity of a nation, and a society can be identified by examining the content and subject of its literature and understand the events of social behaviors and trace the evolution of social phenomena ” (Ruholami, 2000, p. 9). The relationship between literature and social reality is not one-sided. In other words, literature is not a mirror in which the present of a society or social situation is merely reflected. If that was the case, then there would be no distinction between literary texts and social reports or history books. Literature not only emerges from the heart of social reality, but can also have a negative effect on that reality and help it change. It can be said that the relationship between literature and society is a dialectical one; literature arises from social structures, but at the same time it questions and denies those structures. Methodology With the rise of qualitative method in humanities research in recent decades, this method is mostly used in social sciences and humanities such as anthropology, educational sciences, literary studies, cultural studies and political science and is usually a combined research; that is, from a set of methods, techniques, and tools; it uses personal experience, introspection, biography, narrative, cultural products, and a variety of observational texts, historical texts, interactive, and visual texts, and encompasses a wide range of methods of interpretation and interpretive analysis. In fact, due to Richardson, qualitative research is an attempt to understand a phenomenon from different sides and angles and to engage in a process similar to the crystallization of the phenomenon under study (Raha Doost, 2004, p. 250). Since the field of literary research is wide and many of its problems are rooted in the various sciences, the literary researcher usually prefers to start his research activity with a question instead of hypothesizing and presenting a hypothesis or hypotheses after gathering information. Therefore, the place of hypothesis is floating in the design of literary research. Accordingly, how is the interaction and dialectical relationship between agency and structure in the evolution of Persian poetry and literature through the impact of contemporary Iranian socio-political structure forms the main question of this research. In order to answer to this question, this article according to Pierre Bourdieu's theory believes the prevalence of a realist approach in Persian literature provided a good platform for literary figures to establish such a "relationship" with the people and society by focusing on popular concerns and taking them into account during political events. Discussion Events, customs, behaviors, ideas, and moral and social status are considered as an example of a nation's historical background or in other words, social, cultural, and political developments, can be considered as its spoken language. Many of these events can be found in the boundless sea of ​​literary masterpieces. “The literature of any nation represents the heart and soul of that nation and encompasses one of the political and cultural pillars and civilization of any nation” (Grace, 2002, p. 50). Also, since the language of literature in politics is in fact a transition from internal to external thought in a social system, “a society without poetry becomes dumb, and a society that becomes dumb goes into decline.” (Davari Ardakani, 2009, p. 56) The creation of literary works arises from certain social situations, and therefore literature cannot be properly understood unless its relation to the mentioned situation is first carefully analyzed. Reflecting society situations is known as one of the functions of literature. Poetry, as the most prominent creative product of the language system, inevitably strengthens the social contexts of language and enriches the special social functions of language by adding mental mobility. Poetry that enjoys a prominent social status reorganizes language as the only factor in the relations of existence and, in Heidegger's words, “turns language into the home of existence” (Heidegger, 2002, p. 214). Following the Iranians' familiarity with the concept of "national state", which was first introduced in Europe in the 19th century, the interest in this concept (nation-state) as an ideal in which the state is no longer the power and domination but the representation of the people, in Iranian intellectual circles increased. The political structure was such that up to that time, such a government had not been experienced in Iran and there was no such a thing as nation, but it had to be invented, and this heavy task of innovation could be fulfilled through literature. Although Persian literature, despite having a long history in Iran, addresses abstract issues on the one hand and not addresses the concerns of the people on the other hand, caused its presence felt less in the context of society. But since the literary environment could not escape the influence of the social environment resulting from the constitutional changes, the poems of Iranian poets and writers as a literary asset found a large number of customers and audiences through language expressing the realities of society in the linguistic market by establishing a logical "relationship" with social structure. It was after this reception, the writers of poetry realized the value of their possessions more and better, and according to a mechanical and not merely emotional "relationship", the process of composing poetry to the more hidden layers of society was intensified. Conclusion The result of this research indicates that by adopting a realistic approach leading to the establishment of a "relationship" between writers and poets (agency) and the text of society and the audience of their poems (structure), Iranian poetry came out of the abstract state and instead of covering up and reporting general issues, it showed the realities of the society, the needs and demands of the people, and in return, the people recognized the words of the writers as their loud voice.

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]

This analysis situates Charlotte Brontë's narrative representation of performance venues and stagecraft in Villette (1853) within the architectural and social histories of nineteenth-century British theater. Emphasis on the spatial elements of theatrical venues and the spectacular lighting and stage effects afforded by these structures contributes to critical examinations of the novel's many instances of performance. The role played by theaters in the production of national identity, consumer culture, and conventional femininity highlights their social dynamics as experienced by Lucy Snowe, providing semiotically rich sites of cultural critique. Lucy's alienation from her fellow audience members disrupts the projections of cultural unity and collectivity fostered by nineteenth-century theaters, just as recasting stage effects as gothic tropes disrupts the potential marriage plot. Ultimately, Villette's narrative representations of theatrical realism critique both the limitations of mid-century literary realism and the inhospitality of public spaces to single, middle-class women who resist the conventional role prescribed by their gender and class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

V. S. Naipaul's career as a novelist, travel writer, and journalist presents a case study for exploring the links between realist form and the global imagination as they evolve over a 60-year period. This article argues that his work is shaped by an aesthetic of "world realism" that constructs plausible models, through form and content, of the contemporary world as a totalized, structurally-differentiated system. At the same time, it examines how Naipaul's realism mediates the divisions between metropolitan and peripheral space that shape his entry into the world-literary sphere. Analysed in these terms, Naipaul's career falls into three phases, in each of which a distinctive "world-concept" emerges from the conjunction of historical and biographical events, and aesthetic contradictions. Naipaul's world realism complicates critiques in postcolonial studies that he is a puppet of imperial ideology, and unveils the latent commitment to totality underpinning the global novel. World realism reflects an under-theorized conjunction of aesthetics and the global imaginary that unlocks an alternative history of the modern novel produced in frontier spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the realism within the book "Blood on the Forge," by William Attaway and how it relates to Black Chicago Renaissance aesthetics. The author discusses the Black cultural movement in Chicago in comparison to the Harlem Renaissance and examines the Black Arts Movement that followed.

Insurgency, kidnap for ransom, banditry, herdsmen-farmers clash, and gruesome killing of individuals have become quotidian security realities in contemporary Nigeria. Scholarly approach to this concern has often resulted in criticism domiciled only at leadership while neglecting the role of the followership in this security predicament. This paper is therefore designed to examine the representations of the complicity of the people in insecurity using Femi Osofisan's Aringindin and the Nightwatchmen (2002)1 as a case study. The investigation combines a deliberate look at the dramaturgical devices employed by Osofisan to enhance this representation. Georg Lukacs's theory of literary realism and Achille Mbembe's model of the Postcolonial theory are adopted as the framework for the study to unravel the complicity of the people. At the same time, the method applied is the interpretive design and the socio-artistic approach to literary criticism. Osofisan deploys dramatic metaphor, aesthetics of masking, Orunmila motif, and Satire to unmask the villains who mystify efforts to address insecurity and throw the state in a nightmare. The revelations are incredible even as vigilantism is deconstructed. The play points attention to the need to carefully examine proposals on ending insecurity in Nigeria while also contributing to emerging scholarship on investigating the followers with regards to their contribution to their disillusionment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rooted in Italian neorealism, Marxist theory, and centuries of Christian art and music, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Vangelo secondo Matteo reactivates the Gospel against the backdrop of Italian Marxism and social life in the mid-twentieth century. Through a hermeneutical reflection, this paper argues for the film as a central moment in the mediation and reception of the Christian story. Pasolini's transgressive and poetic cinema partakes in and expands a hermeneutical dynamic at the core of the Christian story. The film's documentary style, political subtexts, and eclectic setting highlight how the Christian story is a lived historical experience and thus does not transcend the social or historical circumstances of its telling and retelling. In a reciprocal encounter, both film and Gospel reveal the Christian story's multiple textuality. Taking this as its cue, this article explores how Pasolini's Matthew reveals the role of cinema as a site of hermeneutical and Christological reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]