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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]

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.)

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]

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]

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]

The article studies the co-presence of literary and constitutional realism in the Latin American narrative of violence, in this case, City of God (1997) by the Brazilian author Paulo Lins and Bicentenaire (2004) by the Haitian Lyonel Trouillot. Both realistic texts, in line with Aristotelian requisites, that treat marginalized characters in a space-time with local marks, and 'realist' texts, in line with Rousseauian requisites, that treat the governed subject to citizen norms to be accepted and practiced, allow an appreciation that goes beyond the convened socio-verbal genre to both literary and political meaning. Noting that the category of 'political identity' and the experience of social exclusion unite these realisms in literary-cultural studies and constitutional studies, it is intended to 'read' as a 'democratic act' the writings that fictionalize: the absence of the Brazilian state in the face of peripheral violence, and the repressive violence of the Haitian parapolice State during street protests. When comparing the realisms and situating the constitutional contexts, an 'enlightenment' and 'modern' master language is observed whose exercise (re) produces the 'democratic' imperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study contributes to the critical analysis of selected children's literature by highlighting the experiences of mothers in Philippine society. It aims to identify the occupational roles of mothers and their family members' social identities, exploring their connection to maternal experiences. Utilizing content analysis, 11 Filipino children's books from 2009 to 2016 were selected and examined based on an eclectic conceptual framework comprising literary realism, feminist literary criticism, and intersectionality theory focusing on gender and class. Findings reveal that the intersection of mothers' identified social identities and those of their families, along with their social class, affect the overall experiences of mothers. Hence, this analysis aids in understanding the social representation of characters, benefiting classrooms by enhancing comprehension of learner diversity and improving reading competencies. [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]