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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]

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]

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]

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]

Based on extensive archival research, this article focuses on the key role that the professional reading of foreign fiction had in the cultural mediation that takes place within publishing houses, arguing that readers' reports should be regarded as a form of specialised discourse on literature. It provides the first historical account of the cultural agency of the most important readers of Italian fiction working for British publishers with an interest in European literature in the period 1945–1968 (Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, the Hogarth Press and The Bodley Head), assessing their educational and professional background and its influence on their critical perspective. To do this, it analyses three examples of professional reading, which concern the use of categories such as 'realism' and 'neorealism'; the consideration of genre and readability (with a focus on the translation of Natalia Ginzburg's Lessico famigliare); and the assessment of the political subtext of Vasco Pratolini's trilogy Una storia italiana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Interdisciplinary in scope, this article takes up the 1950 short story, "Ko Danga," by Burmese author Kyay Ni, as a critical lens through which to approach the contemporary political economy of Myanmar's inland fisheries. Due to its level of ethnographic detail, Kyay Ni's account of the inland fisheries regime in early postcolonial Burma provides an effective historic baseline against which to assess more recent developments in this sector - developments outlined herein based on interviews and research trips to inland fishery locations in Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Region. Going further, the article argues that Kyay Ni's writing offers heterodox insights into contemporary political economic concerns, of relevance in Myanmar and more broadly. [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]

The Italian reform of psychiatric health care, which in 1978 brought about the closure of psychiatric hospitals, was the culmination of a process that entailed numerous initiatives to reform the asylum from within, along with public campaigns to involve the general population. This article provides a close reading of one of the most controversial contributions to these campaigns: the photobook Morire di classe. The aim of this study is threefold: first to interpret Morire di classe with reference to the political philosophy of Franco Basaglia, the foremost proponent of the reform; second, to place Morire di classe within the history of Italian visual culture, at a watershed moment marked by the neorealist phototext, the current of concerned photography in Italy, and postmodernism; third, to debunk a number of criticisms that have been recently been leveled at the photobook. This article argues that Morire di classe anticipated strategies of the later postmodern impegno, insofar as it involves its audiences in the construction of meaning rather than imparting a ‘moral lesson'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the short story is regarded as a minor genre in many literary traditions, it is arguably a major one in Australian literature, which, more specifically, was long dominated by the realist short story. Deriving from the colonial "yarns", the so-called "hard-luck stories" were indeed felt to be characterized by a realism that was in turn seen to result from the archetypal dryness of Australia itself. While the contemporary Australian writer Murray Bail has repeatedly questioned the realistic quality of his homeland's literature, he has also sought to broaden the subgenre to which it has often been reduced, namely bush realism. With "Camouflage" (1998), Bail appropriates the hard-luck story to convey a marginal perspective. This article shows how this strategy of revision allows him to contest both the archetypality of bush realism and the stereotypical perceptions of the Australian landscape, thereby problematizing the highly controversial relationship between place and literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual imaginary world of Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was exemplarily suited to his preferred genre, that is, a newly emerging realist prose. Within his own lifetime Balzac’s popular novels were frequently adapted for the stage, and it follows that his highly visual style has also inspired film adaptations since the earliest advent of cinema. Generations of filmmakers have faced the dilemma of how to reflect the descriptive realism of Balzac’s dense writing within the unique language of cinema. One of the more challenging and abstract features of Balzac’s writing is the central importance of memory in many of his texts, among themLe Colonel Chabert(1834) andLa Duchesse de Langeais(1836). In the wake of the antirealist movement in film (following its perceived association with mid-twentieth-century fascism), several recent film adaptations of Balzac have avoided the tendency to produce traditional, highly visual and illustrative interpretations of nineteenth-century realist prose by making original use of the presence or absence of diegetic sound in their films. In so doing, they grant a new realist importance to film audio and engage the viewer in the realist experience of a created and shared memory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 the political and moral rejection of Fascism was prepared before 1943 by developments in the cultural sphere. Realist aesthetics were a main site of explorations that anticipated the Resistance’s rethinking of Fascist conceptions of the self and humanity. The years 1941 and 1942 were particularly fertile ones for the appearance of realist films, criticism, photography, and literature that are often considered precursors of postwar neorealism but deserve attention in their own right. These texts stand today as indications of a collective search to verbalize and give form to complex sensations of transition and rupture that had been opened up by the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to think the simultaneously idealist and realist qualities of the thought of Giambattista Vico, this article considers the axioms of Book I of the Scienza nuova (1730) in the context of literatures on aphorism. It surveys the motley array of eclectic axioms that Vico collects in the first book of his masterpiece, and runs some of those scripts conceptually in order to see them as both found-object stand-ins for realism and as exempla-turned-rules that begin the poetic-logical work of ideation. The essay affirms that aphorisms are phenomena that are essentially collectible and collected. The author of this essay thus articulates five principles of the aphoristic machines produced in the course of such collecting. The essay concludes with the hypothesis that the ideated incompleteness of the aphorism and the cornucopia of inferential potentials that is characteristic of the collection of aphorisms combine to enable us to think realism and idealism together as copious particularity and case-into-rule extrapolations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that Ennio Flaiano's Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, 1947) is both the first Italian postcolonial novel and a highly complex literary work that should be acknowledged as a major text of twentieth-century literature. I discuss the hermeneutic function of parodic intertextuality in Tempo di uccidere, and its relationship with Dante's Commedia. Tempo di uccidere not only subverts many tenets of neorealism (and may therefore in some respects be compared to Italo Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno), but it also exposes the violence inherent in the realist novel as a mode of representation. The article shows how Flaiano highlights hermeneutic issues of misreading, misrepresentation, and the violent erasure of the other, ironically prophesizing its own misreading by critics. Critics and readers have in fact - the article shows - consistently misrepresented, obfuscated, or glossed over the rape and murder of an Ethiopian woman that Flaiano unequivocally places at the centre his text. Tempo di uccidere is a multilevelled, modernist and ultimately postmodernist and allegorical text that - well before Edward Said articulated his own critique - disavows the violence of the realist novel and its complicity with European imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children’s imagined mobilities are determined by a range of interactions, not least through engagement with fictional stories in which childhood itself is imagined, written and re-written, interpreted and re-interpreted. Too often children’s imagined mobilities are overlooked in favour of more instrumental approaches to their mobilities. Drawing from a spatialised literary tradition and a growing focus on literature in mobility studies, this article poses the possibility that imagined mobilities extend the agency of children in an ‘impossible’ adultist world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on work by Peter Adey, Peter Merriman, Kevin Hannam and others to counter a significant body of literary criticism that suggests nineteenth-century fiction is invested in representing place as static. In nineteenth-century Britain, realist fictions of provincial life were often cast – then and now – as nostalgic places, miniaturized and immobile. In a case study of the nineteenth-century realist writer George Eliot this article argues, by contrast, that her seemingly static depictions of provincial life disclose a pattern of micro-mobilities within the local. Eliot’s works unravel the idea that mobilities and moorings are oppositional, and disclose a concern with an embodied practice of dynamic place making through pedestrian practices and tactile labour. Eliot’s fiction offers up a sense of place that is portable, providing frictionless mobility for readers. Her writings also problematize nostalgic ideas of home and return by highlighting the patterns of movement, rest, and encounter that make being-in-place a dynamic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the subsequent siege, and Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip, including ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2008/2009 and ‘Operation Protective Edge’ in 2014, it has become difficult to convey the normality of life in Gaza, a normality that is often elusive in a situation that is increasingly defined by the accelerated and technological violence of dromocolonisation, at the same time that it is marked by what Rob Nixon has termed ‘slow violence.’ To make these forms of violence visible and apprehensible, recent short fiction from Gaza has turned to poetic realism and the use of the sensory experience to represent life under siege. Contrary to visceral realism, which promotes a focus on the body as a site of victimhood and suffering, poetic realism allows the short story writers discussed in this article to reclaim agency and to define a Gazan identity that resists the subjection and subjectification of human rights discourses and of the Anglophone media by focusing both on the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of living in Gaza in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zionist Hebrew literary realism from the 1920s and 1930s is usually considered to be nothing but propagandistic literature, working in the service of national ideological imperatives. Challenging this literary-historical narrative, this essay argues that Zionist realist writers attempted to imagine radical collective transformation, which cannot be reduced to (and was at times at odds with) the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel. Emphasizing the formal similarities between Zionist realism and the structure of utopian novels, the essay suggests that the realists did not simply celebrate a Zionist metanarrative. Rather, realist works by Ever Hadani and Yisrael Zarchi thematize in a variety of ways the contradiction between emancipatory goals and the everyday realities of workers. The essay argues that S. Yizhar’s “Khirbet Khizeh” should be read as expressing the crisis of the collective transformative project that animated the realists’ literary imaginary. In this sense, Yizhar’s novella signals the foreclosure of transformative possibilities in the late 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The official reality claim of the eighteenth-century novel established itself in sharp distinction from fantastic modes of narration (ancient epics, medieval romances, religious allegories, etc.). Realist narratives following the laws of probability draw on a fictional ontology of contingency that goes back to the Aristotelian definition of the term as “possible” and “not necessary.” The pluralistic poetics of the early novel, thereby, not only participate in the programatically modern project “of a scientific scrutiny of life” (Watt) but also forms an essential part of the modern belief in the self-determined nature of the human subject. By contrast, Gothic realism gains all its attraction by depicting impossible events and actions as “real” and assumed unrealities as “possible.” Gothic novels develop an alternative ontology of contingency that actualizes the real possibility of non-being. Next to Walpole’sCastle of Otranto, I analyze Schiller’sGhost Seer. Schiller’s contagious poetics of mimesis transforms calculable contingencies into the imponderability of sheer accidents. Moreover, it is a tale about the mystery of sociality and about the morally justifiable degree of individual freedom. Within a fictional framework of radical indeterminacy and unexpected novelty, Schiller’s tale calls for an ethics ofabsolutecontingency. It does not content itself with taking the possible for real and the real for non-necessary; instead, its narrative environment calls for a radically situational ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the representation of clouds in Adalbert Stifter's (1805–68) literary writing. His ubiquitous representations of clouds signify the poetic challenges to represent empirical reality of natural phenomena (such as weather phenomena) within the literary medium. The article connects his representation of clouds with scholarly discourses of meteorology during the nineteenth century and offers as context observations by the meteorologist Andreas von Baumgartner (1793–1865). Baumgartner worked as a Professor of Natural Sciences at the University of Vienna and was a friend of Stifter's. Taking Baumgartner's epistemological ambiguities about the weather as a point of departure, the article demonstrates how Stifter's novellaKalkstein(1853) not only displays similar insecurities, but also how the text makes use of them to reflect the possibilities of poetic representation within the mode of literary realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay positions the figure and thought of T.W. Adorno in relation to Mulk Raj Anand, and the latter’s foundational contributions to the modern Indian novel in English. In Adorno’s musical writings, “late style” features as a methodological premise, or an expository mode that removes the work from conventional norms of evaluation (including periodization, biography and context). Late style is directed especially toward canonized works that seem to lack current artistic or social relevance, despite their culturally privileged standing. The essay approaches Adorno and Anand, accordingly: Their affiliations with European modernism and postcolonial realism, respectively, are read in late style, or, as largely obsoleted formations of the previous century. Focussing on Anand’s historical fiction,Across the Black Waters(1936), my essay recuperates the novel’s vision of a single if internally differentiated twentieth-century: By imagining the Great War as world-historical crisis, Anand’s novel stages the spaces of continental Europe and an emergent postcolonial nation, together, as the map of an intertwined yet unequal modernity. Today, the obsolescence of Anand’s world-view features as an apposite image for global forces of commodification, rapid cultural aging, and loss of context. Anand’s style attests less to its origins in colonial realism than to the possibilities of a contemporary aesthetic of disintegration — or what Adorno hails as an enactment of the “loss of content” that now inheres in our very understanding of social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 idea of “least likely” (or “hard”) and “most likely” cases with which to test theories has been addressed in many prominent works on qualitative methodology. Such research designs are especially common among those working in the field of security studies. Nevertheless, there exists considerable confusion regarding how these cases should be defined and how authors can draw sound inferences from them. At worst, such confusion leads to the impression that researchers apply the labels of least and most likely cases in an arbitrary fashion. This article advances two related rationales for categorizing cases as least or most likely, describing the necessary steps researchers should follow to employ them correctly. It incorporates literature from security studies to demonstrate the pitfalls that researchers may be vulnerable to without a precise idea of how least and most likely cases should be used. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that Bolaño's novel deploys a modified form of realism that both evidences the “reality effect” defined by Roland Barthes and contributes to the democratization of the reading process theorized by Jacques Rancière. The novel's language and address of the reader thus mimic the politics of the Latin American avant-garde tradition but situate that politics in the realm of realistic detail, rather than within an avant-garde literary sensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses how the problem plays of playwright Henrik Ibsen respond to the growth of the newspaper industry in the late 19th century bourgeois culture. Topics discussed includes information on a short media historical context for the play of Ibsen, the theoretical framework of sociologists Gabriel Tarde and Maurizio Lazzarato, and critical realism of Ibsen.

This essay is a purposive rereading ofRobinson Crusoe(1719) in light of the account given inThe Political History of the Devil(1726) of the superiority of “historically ordered narrative” to epic poetry. Completed in the wake of the Salters’ Hall controversy in which the ongoing conflict between Trinitarian orthodoxy and proponents of the Arian Heresy loomed large and provoked further denominational schism,Robinson Crusoewas conceived as a rebuttal toParadise Lostas well as, more broadly, the narrative techniques underlying epic poetry. In representing the tutelage in consequential logic that Friday undergoes, Defoe challenges the liberties that Milton takes with continuity and chronology in his poem. InThe Political History of the Devil, Defoe later argues that in its discontinuity and use of startling, absorbing imagery, poetry promotes moral hazard and covertly imports theological heresies into its scriptural glosses. ReadingRobinson CrusoeagainstParadise Lostdemonstrates that Defoe's musings on genre are rooted in an express fascination with the new actuarial sciences and emerging categories of risk and influence, and that it is out of this fateful encounter between insurance and theology that the novel emerges. By transforming the theological notion of sin into an economic theory of risk, Defoe used actuarial logic to rationalize Christianity as a teaching based on normative principles of narrative causality for its students to apply in the management of the contingencies of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with a new reading of the photographically illustrated edition of Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia (1953, photographs by Luigi Cocenzi). The aim of this article is not to close-read the very original word and image relationships in the novel but to expand on the meaning and function of the iconography within the broader cultural and intermedial context of Conversazione in Sicilia. We will explicitly situate Vittorini's book and its reception within the wider European context of print culture, visual culture, and intermediality, and, more particularly, within the intricate network of relations between literature and photography. A special emphasis will be put on the complex stances of Neo-Realist authors toward modern visual culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

InNo Fond Return of Love(1961), Aylwin Forbes is surprised to find himself behaving like Edmund fromMansfield Park(1814) and falling in love with a woman whom he previously did not desire. Ironically, Forbes’ compliance with a famous Austen romance plot highlights the ambivalent status of desire and sexuality as driving forces in his own plot. Does he really want Dulcie? In this article, the author discusses Pym's representation of desire through her use (or misuse) of the romance plot, to argue that she modifies this powerful ideological structure to satisfy her own particular sense of realism. Considering the importance of Austen to Pym, the author examines, first, the ways in which the domestic woman, as defined by Nancy Armstrong inDesire and Domestic Fiction(1987), persists and is modified as an object of desire in Pym's novels. Second, considering Patricia Meyer Spacks's argument that eighteenth-century romance plots redefine the myths they reflect, the author considers how Pym's work also complicates romance myths. The author's reading of Pym examines her modification of desire and sexuality in vaguely dissatisfying plots that refuse to pander to readerly desires in an unremitting realistic turn. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fontane's mastery of literary landscapes comes to the fore in Frau Jenny Treibel (1892). Landscapes in Frau Jenny Treibel may be divided, as in Irrungen, Wirrungen, into those of obligation and those of inclination. The landscapes of obligation are the central Berlin locales associated with the two key families-the Schmidts and the Treibels-while the landscapes of inclination are those encountered on excursions away from central Berlin-Leopold Treibel's ride alongside the Spree to Treptow, and the group excursion to Halensee and the Grunewaldsee. The central Berlin landscape wins out, but the abiding landscapes are those of Treptow, Halensee, and the Grunewaldsee, where Leopold and Corinna dream of a love that will never succeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interview with British writer Blake Morrison concentrates on his fiction and poetry. Themes that link his diverse body of work are traced, such as crime and self-revelation. Morrison's fiction is placed within a realist context, aided by discussions of the importance of character, and the 'state in the nation' novel, contrasted with the idea of the unreliable narrator of postmodern fiction, which is also present. The interview discusses the writer's influences-such as American fiction-and his interest in point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of fiction as possible worlds, derived from Leibnizian metaphysics, stimulates investigation of the alethical dimension, the philosophy and the nature of heterorepresentational fiction, and the strained relationship between the fictional and actual worlds. The claim that fictional worlds may exist undermines the philosophy of fiction and basically relies on some form of speculative reasoning that seems to stretch the professional reader's imagination a little too far. All creative writers tightly or loosely construe reality to such an extent that it would be impossible to write a story exempt from any reality-inspired element. But, by mimicking reality, fiction is implicitly dissociating itself from it and therefore anyone taking literary representations at face value would be misled by and misunderstanding the paradox of fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the writing of home within John Galsworthy's (1867-1933) novel The Man of Property. The novel appeared in 1906 and was heralded by The Times Literary Supplement as a new kind of novel that wrote the world in a new and challenging way. Today, however, Galsworthy is rarely seen as an original or inventive writer and is more frequently considered to follow in the tradition of Victorian realism. Yet in The Man of Property there is evidence of stylistic and formal developments that differentiate Galsworthy from Victorian realism. It is a novel that focuses on the homes and home life of Soames and Irene Forsyte, but theirs is not an idealized or sentimentalized relationship; rather, it is one that is expressed through marital rape, megalomania, and the threat of divorce. Taking these themes as a starting point, this article explores how The Man of Property writes home, as both idea and space, in new ways that differentiate it from Victorian realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Realism is not particularly realistic: we accept that it contains multiple ontologies and read ‘reference’ as normative and indeed constitutive of the genre, but if we read it literally and skeptically, this hetero-ontology performs all kinds of wonders and introduces the possibilities of new kinds of belief, new social formations and new ways of being in a world that breaks apart and then mends in a new configuration. Taking an obscure Indian Mutiny/boy's adventure novel – G. A. Henty'sRujub, the Juggler(1893) – as a case study, this article asks us to read realism against its grain and wonder about its routine, but rupturing gestures towards reality, history, as well as to the inexplicable, the supernatural and the other-worldly. How many worlds can a novel contain? What if we insist on suturing them together into one? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay presents a critique of the 2007 novel "Travels in the Scriptorium," by the American author Paul Auster, focusing on its postmodern thematic criticism of hyper-realism. Topics addressed include connections between Auster's story and the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, the depiction of postmodern life through the character of Mr. Blank, and the intentional narrative breakdown of the story at its conclusion.

Thomas Traherne has often been seen as a mystic detached from the turbulence of his period. Recent scholarship has attempted to place him more firmly in context. This article contributes to this trend in arguing that Traherne's late works, especially Commentaries of Heaven, were shaped by the pressure of responding to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Though Traherne makes only one direct reference to Hobbes, his idiosyncrasies in thought, argument, and mode of expression are all fundamentally influenced by the need to counter Hobbes's account of ethics, metaphysics, and language. Traherne is particularly concerned to assert and display an ardent realism against Hobbes's nominalism. In doing so, he creates a complicated play of rhetorical figures, especially abusio or catachresis, as embodying theological commitments. This both places Traherne more clearly against the background of the intellectual history of the period in which he lived, and demonstrates his particularity as a writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates similarities between Vladimir Odoevskii and Fedor Dostoevskii's responses to the modern crisis of identity, a chief concern of both writers. Odoevskii's Schellingian vision of oneness and Dostoevskii's own ideas on unity are placed within a larger framework of the idea of the modern self as articulated by philosopher Charles Taylor and others. For comparison, Odoevskii's presentation of self-transcendence in "The Sylph" is likened to related themes in works by Dostoevskii, particularly "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man." It is found that both authors dramatize the perceived schism between the rational self and intuited higher self that cannot be mended by the analytical reasoning mind, since the latter is seen as the root cause of inner division. In spite of their status as pioneers of Russian realism, both authors present ecstatic vision as the remedial experience through which to gain access to self-knowledge at a transcendent level. The experience of intuitive vision of higher unity in the works examined is expressed by and large in opposition to proponents of rational materialism and positivist views of the modern self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The style of John Updike's prose offers a complex and, at times, surprising philosophy of the postmodern subject. In his memoir, "Self-Consciousness," Updike compares his work to the French novelist Michel Tournier's. It is an overlooked passage, but one that should shape our construal of Updike's characteristic concern with subjectivity in light of what some philosophers heralded as the “death of the subject.” It is not the dissolution of subjectivity, however, but John Dewey's account of the aesthetic subject that best unfolds the formal nuances Updike draws between the emotions, the senses, and the philosophical implications of his literary style. Not incoherence, but depth of affection defines the emotional subject he creates and the deliberately stylized realism of his prose. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines recent studies on neorealism. It explores an article by A. O. Scott published in the March 2009 issue of "New York Times,." which argued on film critic Richard Brody. In the book "Italian Neorealist Cinema," Torunn Haaland describes the character of Italian neorealism. The book "Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style" by Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar accounts neorealism as a film style whose inception went beyond the boundaries of Italy.

The scant attention given to Spain in studies on European realism cannot be attributed to issues of literary quality, because Spanish realism has been widely acknowledged to possess works and authors of extraordinary importance. Rather, it ought to be ascribed to the country's marginal position in Europe in the last two centuries and to the failure of criticism to underscore the movement's uniqueness. An analysis of Spanish realism, as it was defined in contemporary debates and in the writings of some of its most representative authors, shows the movement's determination to distance itself from its French counterpart, as well as its desire to connect with the Golden Age tradition of Miguel de Cervantes and the picaresque novel. This dual impulse shapes its distinctiveness not only thematically, but at the structural and stylistic levels as well. Spanish realism exhibits a unique idiosyncrasy that must be taken into account to understand the protean nature of a richer and far more complex movement than is generally acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article challenges the established reading of Atti impuri and Amado mio, Pasolini's early unfinished novels about young homosexual love, as diaristic. Previous accounts of the Friulan novels have largely ignored the fact that their final redactions were drawn up in Rome, where the author had fled from Friuli in January 1950 in the wake of a sexually tinged scandal. The present analysis suggests that the novels' relationship to their setting should be read as nostalgic, and compares them to the poetic works on Friuli that Pasolini wrote in Rome in the early 1950s. This poetics of absence provides the backdrop for a reflection on the practice of realist authorship that engages with contemporary neorealist narrative from a position of paradoxical outsiderhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on historical analysis based on two interpretive frameworks of modern law and literature. It informs that the first interpretation reveals that the law and literature provide same conceptual and ideological developments. It discusses the other interpretation, which states that law is associated with rule, reasons and hegemony while literature is associated with plurality, emotion and empathy.

This article provides a literary criticism of the short story "Money" written by Cuban author Ronaldo Menéndez Plasencia. The author examines the elements of dirty realism in the work, which was characteristic of Cuban fiction during the 1990s and early 2000s. An analysis of the characters in the shorty story are provided and the topic of sex is also considered within the genre of dirty realism.

This essay studies realism's trajectory as it is articulated in neo-realism and magical realism, and it attempts to establish a middle ground between the Auerbach-Watt perspective which favours the view of realism as having an empiric connectedness with the real and Barthes's approach which sees the language of historicity in terms of 'memory' and 'algebra'. The two test-cases chosen are Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968) and Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (1967). Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's work, this article argues that Titón's film echoes neo-realism's fascination with the protagonist as 'voyant', and that it re-invests the traditional shot-reverse shot with the cinematic energy of the 'time-image'. It subsequently argues that Gabo's magical realism has a back-story which includes not only - as the traditional argument goes, journalism and the 'realism' of his life as a child in Aracataca (for which the barometer is his autobiography, Vivir para contarla; 2002) - but also his early fascination with Italian neo-realist cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Justin Rosenberg's academic writings have from the very beginning attempted to provide an alternative to neorealism in the form of Trotsky's theory of uneven and combined development (U&CD), his attempts at actually replacing it with a general theory of his own have been relatively recent. His initial attempts raised much interest and several responses. In his latest paper, ‘Basic problems in the theory of uneven and combined development, part II: unevenness and political multiplicity’ (Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23:1, 2010, 165–189), Rosenberg acknowledges that in actual fact, despite his attempts to provide an alternative to neorealism, his own theory presupposed political multiplicity, and therefore in his latest article he has sought to rectify this by providing an account of the emergence of ‘politically fragmented space’ which is explicitly grounded in historical materialism (Pozo-Martin, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 20:4, 2007, 554). As such, it is to be welcomed. However, this article argues that if we are to accept Rosenberg's theory of the emergence of multiplicity then it must provide a better explanation than other competing accounts. By using an alternative explanation of the rise of the international, this article demonstrates that Rosenberg's paper has failed to do this, and instead argues for the existence of a transhistorical anarchic environment arising from social rather than political multiplicity. However, U&CD is then used to explain both the intra- and inter-societal stratifications (the latter in terms of distributional structure) that arise. Associated with these stratifications is the inextricable intertwining of the modes of production and modes of inter-state competition. From this combination emerges the general tendencies of societal development, which then need to be applied to the concrete circumstances of history. In so doing, we need to account for the different analytical registers of genesis, structure, epoch and conjuncture and the unique concatenation of factors that pertain for each of these (Callinicos, International Politics, 6:3, 2005, 362). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dr. Zhivago is analyzed as a poet's biography that eschews the traditional psychologism and historical realism normally associated with the novel genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the work of Pío Baroja in one of his later trilogies, La selva oscura . It focuses upon the ‘crimen de Beizama’. This crime is referred to under the title of ‘Silencio’ in Book Four of El cabo de las tormentas (Volume 2 of La selva oscura). Yet the same crime also forms a substantial part of Las mascaradassangrientas in Baroja's Memorias de un hombre de acción . The article considers how Baroja portrays the same crime in two different texts, set in entirely different historical moments. Having located many of the documentary sources Baroja may have had at his disposal, notably newspaper reports and pamphlets, the article compares the details contained in these with those portrayed in both ‘Silencio’ and Las mascaradas sangrientas in order to ascertain exactly how Baroja was using source material as well as what kind of Realism he was cultivating towards the end of his career and how it might be defined. What becomes clear is that Baroja gives two entirely different and contrasting portrayals and that he uses documentary material to serve different purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]