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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]

The article explores the literary genre of "Evangelical fiction," marketed through the Christian Retailers’ Association, including several works by Ted Dekker such as "The Slumber of Christianity: Awakening a Passion for Heaven on Earth," "Black," and the "Paradise Trilogy" of novels "Showdown," "Saint," and "Sinner." It explores the history of American Evangelical fiction, the use of The Fantastic in such works, and literary realism.

Ludwig Tieck's last Novellen mark the threshold between romantic and realistic literature. Focusing on Waldeinsamkeit, the essay analyses how motifs and narrative strategies of the Romantic Kunstmärchen are reformulated, pointing towards a new form of novellistic narration that hovers ambivalently between Romanticisation and disillusionment. This transformation reacts both to the experience of modernisation and to the new status of literature following the age of Goethe. It displaces features of the fairytale, such as the emphasis on the miraculous, as well as the poetological reflexivity of early Romantic literature, into realistic narration and thus contributes to the historical specificity of the German Novelle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grillparzer's Der arme Spielmann exemplifies the truth that the nineteenth-century German novella, although informed by the philosophical and cultural legacy of German idealist aesthetics, also embodies a narrative critique of it. The poetic realist novella in German should therefore be read in the context of German idealist aesthetics but never reduced to the terms which that aesthetics defines. This essay challenges, through a detailed analysis of Grillparzer's text, the view that German poetic realism expresses an idea of art which is supposed to be transcendent of the world of economic necessity and social facts. On the contrary, Grillparzer's novella is shown to highlight the contradiction between that world and the way its central character experiences 'art'. Unlike the major modes of idealist aesthetics, and despite its concern with the 'formless art' of music, this text does not endorse an idea of artistic creation derived from the non-verbal arts, in which art more embodies than represents the real. Grillparzer's text does not hide but rather foregrounds the process of literary creation. It emphasises the distance between any supposedly disengaged realism and the actuality of experience. The essay both argues this thesis in detail in relation to Grillparzer's Der arme Spielmann and shows its relevance to the reassessment of German poetic realism in German as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces what might be called an epistemology of realism: the attempt to gather empirical evidence about the world, to then selectively represent that evidence so as to make the others we encounter as intelligible as possible, but all the while acknowledging, implicitly or explicitly, that such complete knowledge is unattainable. In this way, realism continually comes up against its own epistemological endeavors. In what follows, I take a brief look at definitions, both conventional and troubling, of realism, the historical context out of which realism developed, and the historical trajectory of the 20th-century criticism about realism. I then examine some of the more recent work on realism, focusing in particular on the trend of viewing realism in relation to epistemology. I conclude by performing two short readings of realist novels that utilize this epistemological lens in order to illustrate how this way of reading realism not only underscores some of the tough epistemological questions that realist writers grappled with but also draws our attention to texts previously defined as outside of the realist paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at fanfiction (fanfic) written about the characters and settings in the book "Pride and Prejudice" (P&P) by Jane Austen. Particular focus is given to tensions between meaningfulness, realism, and openness in the creation of fanfic and fanfic authors' depictions of literary characters. Other topics include prequels and identification.

Sir Walter Scott's Waverley has long been regarded as the originator of the historical novel, and much critical interest in the text centres on the way it presents 'history'. This privileging of the temporal has obscured what is perhaps an even greater achievement by Scott: the complex way in which he handles 'space'. This article examines the way roads have been described in terms of regions or networks in the novel but adds a third spatial model, fluidity, which has important consequences for how Waverley has been read, especially in terms of the 'periphery' of romance and its separation from 'history'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of the nineteenth century in Germany saw a sudden interest in the new scientific discourses on homosexuality. In late realist fiction around this time, queer characters also became more visible than ever before, a phenomenon which has been little explored. Queer female figures are necessarily drawn obliquely in canonical bourgeois texts, and are remarkable for the complexity of the intertextual codes through which their sexuality is revealed. Theodor Fontane's portrait of the opera singer Trippelli in Effi Briest is a key - and hitherto unrecognised - example. Other late realist authors, such as Hedwig Dohm and Gabriele Reuter, also display a highly nuanced understanding of the fluidity of sexual identity. They identify the element of performance which accompanies it, long before the insights of Judith Butler or even Foucault. In contrast, Aimée Duc, in her explicitly lesbian popular fiction, written for a niche market, provides perhaps the most uncomplicated view of female homosexuality. She nonetheless carries off an accomplished interrogation of the prejudices informing Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing's theories, which continue to colour western conceptions of sexuality to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the novel "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown is presented. It examines how the book blends aspects of narrative history into the genre of fiction and explores ways in which historical fiction bestsellers often combine elements of both fiction and nonfiction. The theme of realism in the plot is analyzed along with the impact of the novel on historical understanding by the readership.

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, attributed to Big Brother’s arch-enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein, is the book-in-book in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Along with the appendix, it provides the reader with a theoretical and philosophical framework that complements the narrative. First I point out the importance of Goldstein’s tract on an intratextual level; then my focus shifts towards its intertextuality with influential works of European intellectual history, such as Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848), Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) and Burnham’s Managerial Revolution (1941). Bringing into focus the myriad of perspectives that result from the intra-, inter- and extratextual layers in the text, the article shows that the treatise is the ultimate example of Orwell’s distinctive fusion of realism and satire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Kant, Science, and Human Nature," by Robert Hanna is presented. It explores the interpretation of Hanna on the concept of Immanuel Kant's philosophy and agrees on some of his assumptions. It further examines the strong transcendental idealism of Kant as Hanna suggested that charitable reconstruction of the philosophy of Kant should avoid firm interpretation of transcendental idealism. An overview of Hanna's argument over realism is offered.

The ‘special composition question’ is this: given objects O1, . . . , On, under what conditions is there an object O, such that O1, . . . , On compose O? This paper explores a heterodox answer to this question, one that casts composition as a secondary quality. According to the approach I want to consider, there is an O that O1, . . . , On compose (roughly) just in case a normal intuiter would, under normal conditions, intuit that there is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demonstrates how writer Gertrud von le Fort's incorporates the theological ramifications of Catholic doctrine into her fiction as a means of developing a `sacramental realism' within which divine grace is shown to be at work. Use of the doctrine of substitution; Assessment of her overall contribution to 20th century German literature.

The article discusses the academic approach of the New Historicism in relation to the psychopathology of everyday life in modern cities. Topics include literary critic Catherine Gallagher's views on literary realism in the novel "Felix Holt the Radical," by George Eliot, the relation between anxiety and sanitary reforms, and the work "Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain," by Edwin Chadwick.

The article disputes the claim that the cinema must supersede the realistic novel. Topics addressed include discussion of the attempt of the majority of novels to be realistic, the argument that realistic fiction is not competing with the cinema as a representational mode of signification, and the difference between the replication of visible surfaces and the presentation of visual experience.

The article discusses the work of the American playwrights David Rabe and Sam Shepard during the 1970s. Topics addressed include the reputation earned by Rabe's three plays based on his experiences in Vietnam; the playwrights' creation of a new realism aesthetic which had been enriched by the experimental theater of the 1960s, and the defusion of the theme of menace in the plays of Shepard.

The article examines the literary critic Georg Lukács's challenges of modernism. Topics addressed include the fusion of Marxist sociology and Hegelian aesthetics in Lukács's literary theory, the centrality of realism in the work of Lukács, and the presence of cultural nostalgia in Lukács's strictures on modern literature.

The article presents a critique of the 1974 novel "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," by Robert M. Pirsig. Topics addressed include a review of the novel's synopsis and its philosophical content, discussion of the concreteness with which the main character's journey is portrayed, and the literary merits of the novel's realism.

Focuses on realism in works of fiction. Reasons for stressing the importance of characters in novels; Functions and subject-matter of novelists; Ways in which novels depict the real world through characters and circumstances.

The realism in the Vita Nuova is an argument in favor of the genuineness of the narrative and the persons mentioned. Too often the work is regarded as mere allegory and Beatrice is thought to be only idealistic symbolism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on the history of Italian literature. Background on Italian neo-realism; Reputation of Italian literary figure Giovanni Papini; Popularity of literary prizes in Italy.

An interview with Jay Asher, author of the young adult novel "Thirteen Reasons Why," is presented. When asked about his other books, Asher comments on his appreciation for humorous books for children. He discusses the topic of "Thirteen Reasons Why," which deals with teenage suicide. Other topics addressed include the awareness of audience when writing young adult (YA) novels, aspects of realistic young adult fiction, and the possibility of a sequel to the book.