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This article investigates the specific realism deployed in To Live (1993), Yu Hua's description of the struggles of the spoiled son of a wealthy landowner transformed into a kindhearted peasant after the revolution. The analysis shows how narrative technique and Yu Hua's active interventions in his narrative affect the novel. Originally banned in China, it was later called one of the nation's most influential books. Three main themes within the novel are highlighted, that of violence and death, the role of spiritual cynicism, and the general humanism pervading the narrative. Five types of narrative operations are at play in To Live: the use of a dual voice, the invention of unique plot patterns, the mechanism of anachrony, the recourse to metalanguage, and the technique of double-voiced discourse. The ultimate purpose of this expanded realism is to make readers understand the world thanks to embodied experiences of language and not just by following a sequence of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the history of the Swahili novel in its development from realism to experimental prose and follows the experimental phase back to realism in the recent works of some former literary experimenters. This trend is called and defined here as 'neo-realism.' The motivation for this return to realism is found in the domains of aesthetics, didacticism, reception of literature, politics and economy, and philosophy. The primacy of aesthetic and philosophical reasons motivating the move to 'neo-realism' is questioned and emphasis is placed on the political and social driving forces behind Swahili 'neo-realist' writing. While postcolonial authors insist on the empowerment of the periphery, the affirmation of alterity, and economic and social development, the experimental novel appears to work against these aims through its glorification of chaos, of pathological states of mind, dissolving values, collapsing causality, undermining temporal and spatial orientation, disrupting cognitive continuity and clarity, and subverting language. The complexity of the experimental novel is perceived as an obstacle to an implementation of literature's declared political and social agendas, such as criticism of corruption, women empowerment, education about medical issues, and ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Choukri's Al-Khubz al- Ḥāfī in relation to the widely circulated Euro-American geo-literary imaginary of cosmopolitan Tangier. The paper highlights the political expediency of the Arabic text showing how Choukri challenges the rhetorical violence of silencing the Moroccans in European and American accounts by casting them in roles of natives/Muslims outside discourses of citizenship in the modern city. Most fully, the following analysis illustrates how Choukri uses realist representation to engage with the city's spheres of monetary circulation and social indifference to unsettle totalizing representations of Tangier's cosmopolitanism. Finally, the paper reexamines dismissive Arab critics' reception of the text, arguing for the necessity of reimagining it ill relation to discourses of the modern city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article begins by contextualizing Ben Okri's concept of reality within a traditional, cultural framework. A brief discussion of the trajectory of African writing and the standard classifications of the mode of the Okri oeuvre as either non-realist or magical realism follows. The argument challenges both appellations in light of a fairly recent interview with the author (London, 16 February 2011) in which Okri redefines "reality" in terms of an animistic full keyboard of life. The stance of the article ultimately eschews classification of a paradise lost and regained, thus avoiding any classification that might contradict the mercurial "unfoldment" (the birth of ideas coming forth from the mind) of the spirit in Starbook (2007). This article proceeds to provide the rationale for the title chosen by quoting from both Okri's Stars of the New Curfew (1988) and Starbook (2007) and by linking the ideas of chaos and consolation as integral to enlightenment. Short discussions on cosmic consciousness, transpersonal experience, the sublime, the myth of eternal return, and what is understood by an axis mundi are embedded in the argument--drawing principally on Mircea Eliade and Gerald Larue--and an attempt is made to show how these concepts can be applied to a reading of Okri's eleventh prose work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By making Newland Archer's age at the end of "The Age of Innocence" (1920) the same as hers at the time of writing, Edith Wharton clearly urges a comparison between herself and her protagonist. Pursuing this comparison, I argue that what Wharton shares significantly with Archer is neither character nor biography, but rather a particular situation: that of outliving the world that had formed her. Wharton, in this novel, explores the shape and consequences of this distinctly modern experience of historical dislocation and seeks to come to terms with her own belatedness as a novelist of manners. "The Age of Innocence," I further claim, represents Wharton's solution to the central impasse facing the realist tradition in the post-Nietzschean, post-WWI intellectual climate. Her last major artistic achievement, the novel also stands as her most self-conscious and ironic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ian McEwan's "Saturday" (2005) is simultaneously a realist narrative, committed to exploring a particularly troubled moment in contemporary history through the consciousness of the scientifically-minded Henry Perowne, and a larger, less strictly rational vision of poetic language and imagination. The narrative point of view remains close to Henry's narrowly-construed materialism, but unbeknownst to him, elements of the plot, scenes and language are constructed out of literary texts that hover above the narrative. The essay argues that these literary ghosts complicate the novel's seeming commitment to Enlightenment ideals of scientific progress and rational explanation. Layered in this way, the novel is a much more complex and inclusive depiction of the relationship between materialist explanation and poetic imagination than its plot and its discussions of literature versus science would seem to allow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay defends the proposition that in tragedy and realism Achebe finds the efficacious aesthetic means to remake the African person and world-as represented by Okonkwo and Umuofia in Things Fall Apart-to humanist measure. In invoking the two aesthetic forms, Achebe is to be seen delivering a literary rebuke to Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary. Conrad's use of impressionism in evoking the Congo's presumed lack of humanity in Heart of Darkness impliedly denied that realism could have an African normativity. On the other hand, Cary's Mister Johnson denied proper tragic stature to the African-and hence a humanity commensurate with the European-whose story it was telling by depicting him in mock tragedy. Pitted against Eurocentric denial is Achebe's tragic-realist insistence in Things Fall Apart that African realities are humanistically translatable; and that African persons and worlds have a humanistic commensurability with those elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In winning so many prestigious literary prizes on the international scene, Ahmadou Kourouma achieved in his lifetime what most African writers can only dream of: notoriety, superstardom, impressive book sales, a mythical stature. This study examines the underpinnings of Kourouma's status by analyzing the scholarly and journalistic reception of his works as inventoried through the Klapp bibliography. It offers an important background for better understanding the rhetoric that sustains the myth while raising very interesting guiding questions. For if Kourouma is elevated to the rank of Great innovator of literature, is he read as such, and does this "revolution" in African letters that he embodies also extend to critical discourse? When the novelist writes "differently," is the reader (general or scholarly) inclined and obliged to read differently? What has been the consequence on Kourouma's writings of the spectacular reversal from a Eurocentric view of African literature to an Afrocentric perspective? Have Kourouma's works not suffered paradoxically from the laudatory scholarly reception because of its overemphasis on realism and truthfulness? Is the truth discourse, which feeds such reception, not contributing to minimizing the literariness of Kourouma's writings? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on the use of the deus ex machina plotting devices in Chartist and working-class fiction. Inclusion of deus ex machina in the melodramatic aspects of plotting; Opposition of critics to the dependence of Chartist and working-class fiction writing on deus ex machina; Creation of dialectical discordances between romance and realism by the Chartist version of the deus ex machina.

Examines the use of mythology and realism as historical catharsis in the works by white South African writers after the apartheid. Purification of the signifiers in the appropriation of the Greek and Christian myths; Influence of human on the crimes in the country; Deconstruction of the mythological images; Depiction of cruelties inflicted by the church.

The article focuses on the development of postrealistic Hebrew literature that took place during 1950-80. Topics addressed include an overview of the historical events that led to the development of many postrealistic Hebrew writers, various novels on Jewish existence in Israel that were written at the end of postrealistic period (1960-90), and changes identified in Hebrew poetry during the 1960s.

The article discusses the influence of magic realism in Hebrew literature on Israeli fiction in the early 20th century. Topics addressed include the definition of magic realism and its forms, description of various novels depicting plot of magic realism, contrasting the momentum of the realist tradition in Hebrew prose, and reasons why this mode of fiction appeals to some younger Israeli writers.