Search

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]

The article focuses on Canadian fiction such as Leon Rooke's"The House on Major Street" which explodes auto fiction's self-focus. It mentions that Boyagoda's second novel, "Beggar's Feast" tended towards realism while "Original Prin" resumes the earlier, more adventurous style. It also mentions that multiculturalism approaching Christian chauvinism while at the same time exposing Islamic chauvinism.

Mac Wellman, the contemporary American playwright, has said that there is a lot of George Steiner's Antigones (where Steiner discusses the influence of Sophocles's play on later writers and philosophers) in his Antigone of 2000. Explicating that relationship reveals that Wellman uses this material in various ways to present a view of the world that has much in common with, and is deeply indebted to, the realist tradition in philosophy and literature. It is also made clear that Wellman's interest in these authors and this tradition goes far beyond his reading of Steiner's book. Major elements of that 'Hegelian theme' are the division of the spiritual and the real realms, the division within the real realm between word and deed, the predominance of time and change, and the imperfection of the human spirit, leading to endless conflict and disaster. The self, a spiritual thing, is driven to act and encounters resistance but, in the process, proves itself - self-realization. As it proceeds in self-realization, it longs for and, on very rare occasions, succeeds in becoming one with the Absolute. Mac Wellman, true to this philosophical tradition, is a frustrated idealist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Percival Everett's novel Zulus (1989) is a dark and deeply engrossing post-apocalyptic meditation on the ravages of war and its tyrannical effect on human communication, connections, and understanding. It is also a satire and a foray, both comic and deadly serious, into the grotesque realism of the tradition of Rabelais and Swift. The article examines aspects of grotesque realism and the carnivalesque through a Bakhtinian lens and explores Zulus in light of current theory concerning fat, embodiment, and what Mark Graham coins as lipoliteracy; that is, the way we 'read' fat as conveying intelligible messages about bodies and food. Thus, the article embraces, yet moves beyond, standard readings of the grotesque body by exploring the materiality of the fat body as it is affected and as it affects societal standards of the corporeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on "subnatural," a third type of landscape as described by French gardener and writer Gilles Clément which according to him consists of smoke, puddles and dust. Topics discussed include the rural settings of Romanticism and Realism, criticism of the depiction of the natural world by Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, and a 1918 essay by German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin on Austrian writer and poet Stifter's writing.

This essay proposes a new critical approach to modern prairie fiction through a reading of Edward McCourt's self-contradictory criticism and novels. The author re-evaluates McCourt's literary significance and locates his book, "The Canadian West in Fiction," at the beginning of a formative and enduring prairie-realist "school" of criticism with geographical, thematic, and regionalist emphases. This essay suggests that these same theses, ironically, are partly responsible for the neglect of McCourt's own significant fiction, which resists them. These established and influential theses have disconnected prairie writing from larger modern movements and its rarely acknowledged international, psychological, and experimental aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Novel Démeublé" is Willa Cather's most influential and, for all its plain-spokenness, most enigmatic statement of the principles of her novelistic art. "How wonderful," she writes, "it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended..." Cather insists not just on ridding the house of fiction of its superfluous and meaningless clutter, but in stripping it bare—an indication of the drastic narrative and spiritual economies she deems essential to its artistic integrity and, indeed, survival. This essay explores what is demanded and what is foreseen in Cather's call for a radical divestiture of the novel's traditional furnishings by attending to that concluding image of the novel démeublé as a Pentecostal chamber in which numinous reality is translated into the common tongue. Such novelistic miracles are not only possible but necessary to the moral and historical realism of her two finest novels, "Death Comes to the Archbishop" and "The Professor's House." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the dime-novel western is affected by the predominance of performance westerns such as film, Wild West, and stage drama. The dime western compulsively describes the bodies of its characters to establish their social meanings within both particular dime stories and larger narratives of frontier history. Dime-western bodies are marked so that audiences can scrutinize their authenticity, assessing quickly where each body fits in the pantheon of western history and comparing each body's actions to the historical “script.” The dime-novel western is assiduous in its devotion to revealing the truth of the body; whether disguised, mistaken, lost, unknown, or de-racialized, the dime western renders visible the authentic body, and each body is invariably rewarded or punished according to its ideological role in promoting or impeding popular notions of frontier history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the relationship between parody and the realist novel. Description of realism; Parameters of parody; Examples and analysis of several 19th century French novels.

Analyzes Frederick Philip Grove's novel "Settlers of the Marsh." Comment on the psychological depth of the novel; Deficiency in realism and truth to life in the novel; Views on the reality of people, places and things in Grove's works.

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "In Parenthesis," by David Jones. Topics include the realism of the poem's visual images in relation to Jones's work as a painter, the representation of war in the poem, and the mythic or religious aspects of the work. The conveyance of light and space using words is addressed.