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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]

O'Brien's nonsense prose in "At Swim-Two-Birds" and "The Third Policeman" reveals how his cyclical narratives draw several fictional levels and styles together as a basic principle of the novels' structure. O'Brien employed literary conventions in using the novel form but did so in a manner that results in a defamiliarization of the common ideas of fiction, character, and authorship. He turns the novel, a literary form, into a textual circus that opposes literary realism, revealing novel writing itself to be "a self-evident sham." This article explores how O'Brien's nonsense portraits of rebellious characters and his playing with structure unsettle the boundaries of fiction and reality. The article discusses the formation of a mosaic text that consistently undermines the possibility of an objective representation of reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics agree that Don Quixote helped originate realism, but its influence on nineteenth-century novels has been widely misunderstood. Realist Quixotism, usually assumed to oppose book and world, in fact models a dynamic imbrication of fictionality and reality. Thus, it helps bridge the normative and utopian functions of literary realism. This concept of realism is both exemplified and theorized by Anthony Trollope's novels, which insist on the mutual construction of literary and social convention. Their metaleptic narration, Victorian marriage plots, and use of the everyday illustrate how metafictionality, counterintuitively, can help construct a sense of the realistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Thélème is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid 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.)

Time and space are of foremost importance in the dramatic economy of medieval epic poems because they serve the important function of situating the reader spatially and chronologically. In the Cantar de Mio Cid, the poet places particular emphasis on the theme of time, enumerating the years, months, weeks, and days for his reader to present his narrative as a verisimilar, if not historic, chronicle. This study seeks to interrogate the time that elapses from the beginning of the poem to the end, arguing that the poet's penchant for relative chronological precision betrays an effort to convey his story as historical fact. His ability to weave fiction and reality has greatly contributed to the Cantar's timelessness, one that renders it relevant even in our modern society. The representation of time helps create the illusion of realism, helping to humanize Rodrigo Díaz and heightening the dramatic impact of the poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author considers novel as a theory of allegory. It mentions about the ontological formalism that eschews the historical materialism at the center of the new formalism. It also informs that the appearance of depth psychology was therefore a kind of MacGuffin and realism remained tied to typology and epigrammatic abstraction.

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]

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 article presents a literary criticims of the graphic narratives "American Born Chinese," by Gene Luen Yang and "Strange Fruit: Uncelebrated Narratives From Black History," by Joel Christian Gill. It outlines racial issues and the experience of minority groups in the U.S., the struggle of Asian Americans since the 19th century and the sufferings of African Americans. The integration of realism and genre fiction in the narratives is discussed.

Copyright of Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens is the property of Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee 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.)

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]

A literary criticism of the book "Martin Eden" by Jack London is presented. It is noted that London has focused on the American sea literature and has dramatized the physical degradation of workers by highlighting their turmoil. It outlines the characters of the novel and discusses the importance of the characters in the book. The historic tension between realism and romanticism is also discussed.

This paper investigates British novelist and critic Zadie Smith's authorial persona as a construction of marketing strategies, critical reception and her own public pronouncements and nonfictional writing. It engages with key concepts of race and multiculturalism - how they are commodified in consumerist culture, and in popular and academic discourse, and how Zadie Smith renovates/deconstructs/deforms these complex categories and stereotypes in her work - both fictional and non-fictional. This interrogation is then linked to her form of modified realism and the ways in which Smith's most recently-published novel NW (2012) seeks to open out these categories in ways that belie their one-dimensionality in the popular media. [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]

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]

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]

Assuming there are fictional objects, what sorts of properties do they have? Intuitively, most of their properties involve being represented-appearing in works of fiction, being depicted as clever, being portrayed by actors, being admired or feared, and so on. But several philosophers, including Saul Kripke, Peter van Inwagen, Kendall Walton, and Amie Thomasson, argue that even if there are fictional objects, they are not really represented in some or all of these cases. I reconstruct four kinds of arguments for this unexpected conclusion; they concern the semantics of names, pragmatic force, creation, and representations' qualitative content. But I find all the arguments flawed. I then argue for the contrary, employing a new perspective: representation of fictional objects begins with the works of fiction that originate them. A work of fiction represents its 'native' objects because our culture bestows that property on it (and on other works of fiction). I sketch conditions for such property bestowal and argue that they are satisfied in this case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Ballantyne’s novel The Cunninghams (1948) was deemed upon publication to be a “masterly study of working-class family life in a New Zealand town” and it was praised for its “utmost fidelity” to the “minutiae of small-town life”. The novel’s grim tone, Depression-era setting, local referent and critical realism did much to establish Ballantyne as an author with “social interests”, as did his own assertion that a writer is “an investigator of human existence” who “must try to understand the way in which average people live out their time”. Ballantyne was one of several new writers deemed to be the “sons” of Frank Sargeson, capable of developing the line of realism established by the latter’s short stories that appeared between 1935 and 1945. Yet, in spite of his early promise, Ballantyne’s career as a fiction writer failed to take off, partly because of a long period of alcoholism, and partly because of the direction he took in his subsequent fiction. If his first novel answered literary nationalism’s need for an authentic depiction of local life, then Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968), with its gestures towards the non-realist modes of fairy tale and gothic, was almost guaranteed to remain outside the body of writing understood to constitute “New Zealand literature”. Yet, by combining aspects of realist with non-realist modes, the novel creates a mythologized version of New Zealand society in which threats associated with sexuality take on nightmarish, almost elemental forms that are far more effective in terms of representing the ways in which New Zealand society can damage the individual than social realism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the introduction of Jalal-ad-Din Khwarizm Shah (Celâleddin Harzemşah) -one of the most substantial and representative examples of Tanzimat's thinking on fictional writing- Namık Kemal's comments on the nature of realistic narration reveals that the perception of the real among Tanzimat intelligentsia was in a stark conflict with the so-called (un)realistic features of traditional Turkish folk narratives. Namık Kemal's approach to the traditional folk narratives indicates that for Tanzimat intellectuals folk narratives were not realistic because of supernatural features which were quite common in these narratives. It is clear that Namık Kemal's view of realism was determined and limited by the ultimate Westernization of narration and narratives. Hence, the realistic account of the real was by no means possible via traditional narration. In this paper, however, it is argued that contrary to the Tanzimat intellectuals' and Namık Kemal's views on realism -as Western-rooted and the only form of realism- there are many forms and dimensions of realism and most of them have consistently been employed in folk narratives. In order to show this, through a discussion that embraces narration tradition from folk tales to the Tanzimat novels, some dimensions, in which the realistic features of a narration can be observed and will be examined. The main aim of this paper is to reveal that traditional folk narratives were as much real and realistic as Tanzimat novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with Dai Sijie's representation of Eastern and Western identities, their relationships, and misreading in light of the reception, best-sellerization, and film adaptation of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. These various modes of commercialization add layers of cultural consumption and exploitation to the ones Dai sets up in his comparative approach between French Realist literature and Chinese culture. The reception of the novel stresses both the attraction of an exotic world and the universal qualities of Dai's homage to European literature. While the book was packaged as a universal story about reading, love and personal development, Dai problematizes such universal lessons and warns against the limitations of partial readings. Hence, the reception and promotion of the book are ironically contrary to the novel's own message. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two most prominent critical readings of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" assert that Edna Pontellier's final actions represent either the mythical triumph of self over a restrictive patriarchy, or, contrarily, the tragic, inevitable defeat of a woman striving to combine motherhood with personhood. Challenging these readings, this paper argues that Edna's actions reveal the danger of withdrawing from all available social roles in favor of an identity-less, though ultimately elusive and destructive, freedom. This paper also argues that "The Awakening," although traditionally aligned with realism and naturalism, implicitly questions the values associated with these modes of representation. Portraying identity as a social fiction one inhabits with a certain amount of willpower, the text complicates realism's insistence on the empirical; depicting women who wield significant power over their lives, as well as a protagonist who erroneously believes she has no say over her own, the novella undermines naturalism's tendency toward fatalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author analyzes the concept of exclusionary realism in the novels of Thomas Hardy. The author argues that the use and exposure of the structure of realist conventions render the novel's texts simultaneously realist and anti-realist making it impossible to distinguish the reflective quality of conventional realist representation from the exclusive, particularly fantasy. It also discusses the characteristics reflected by the landscapes and surroundings used in the novel which are symbolic representations.

The article analyzes forms of realism in two Hindi short stories by Dalit authors in India: "Pacchis Chauka Derh Sau" ("25 Times Four Equals 150," 2000) by Omprakash Valmiki, and "Lathi" ("The Stick," 2004) by Jaiprakash Kardam. The "melodramatic realism" of these two stories is seen as an innovative narrative strategy in Dalit literature expressing subaltern social protest.

The article explores the theme of theatricality in everyday life in the novel "The Princess Casamassima" by Henry James. The author reflects on the confluence of philanthropy and tourism in London, England and aspects of community that reveal a pageant of social spectacle. The character of Hyacinth Robinson is analyzed in relation to his ties to revolutionary ambitions and the psychology of consumerism. It is suggested that James depicts the limits of realism through the prism of his historical context.

An essay is presented regarding the play "Madame Bovary: mœurs de province" based from the novel of Gustave Flaubert. It notes that the readers had ignored the novel's religious discussion considering its language and categorization as a realism. It explores the inspiration, setting, and characters of the play and relates them to the Bible and phlebotomy. Moreover, the author mentions that Flaubert has created one scene in the play that should not be read.

This paper argues that there is no genuine puzzle of ‘imaginative resistance’. In part 1 of the paper I argue that the imaginability of fictional propositions is relative to a range of different factors including the ‘thickness’ of certain concepts, and certain pre-theoretical and theoretical commitments. I suggest that those holding realist moral commitments may be more susceptible to resistance and inability than those holding non-realist commitments, and that it is such realist commitments that ultimately motivate the problem. However, I argue that the relativity of imaginability is not a particularly puzzling feature of imagination. In part 2, I claim that it is the so-called ‘alethic’ puzzle, concerning fictional truth, which generates a real puzzle about imaginative resistance. However, I argue that the alethic puzzle itself depends on certain realist assumptions about the nature of fictional truth which are implausible and should be rejected in favour of an interpretive view of fictional truth. Once this is done, I contend, it becomes evident that the supposed problem of imaginative resistance as it has hitherto been discussed in the literature is not puzzling at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fictional realism, i.e., the view that because fictions exist, fictional characters exist as well, has recently been accused of leading to inconsistency generated by phenomena of indeterminacy and inconsistency in fiction. We examine in detail four arguments against fictional realism, and present a version of fictional realism which can withstand those arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contrast between real and fictional characters in our thinking needs further elaboration. In this commentary on Eco's look at the ontology of the semiotic object, I suggest that human semiotic construction entails constant modulation of the relationship between the states of the real and fictional characters in irreversible time. Literary characters are examples of crystallized fictions which function as semiotic anchors in the fluid construction - by the readers - of their understandings of the world. Literary characters are thus fictions that are real in their functions - while the actual reality of meaningmaking consists of ever new fictions of fluid (transitory) nature. Eco's ontological look at the contrast of the semiotic object with perceptual objects (Gegenstände) in Alexius Meinong's theorizing needs to be complemented by the semiotic subject. Cultural mythologies of human societies set the stage for such invention and maintenance of such dynamic unity of fictionally real and realistically fictional characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the modernity of the novel according to José Ortega y Gasset. It offers a look at the account of the novel "Don Quixote" in Ortega's "First Meditation: A Short Treatise on the Novel." According to Ortega, the realism of the novel is its ability to provoke desires that it teaches must fail. The novel's modernity for him consists in its ability to provoke a response that realizes the tension between the known and the unknown, the tension that structures the experience of reality.

The article explores the formalism/realism dichotomy often used to characterize literary trends, focusing on novels, the genre at the center of 20th century debates on literary mimesis. The author also explores the ambivalence expressed by French literary critics and writers who grapple with the relationship of literature to reality.

Moghaddam has suggested that psychologists could profit from the study of fiction. Although agreeing with Moghaddam in general, I feel it necessary to specify, fairly closely, the type of fiction which might be susceptible to psychological analysis. I choose literary realism, as defined by Weitek, as a possible area for fruitful analysis. Having discounted the difficulties possibly besetting such an analysis, I give some examples of the ways in which the study of the works of those working in the literary realist tradition could enlarge and enhance our understanding of psychological processes. Ultimately, however, I conclude that, in order to benefit fully from such a study, psychology would have to undergo a conceptual transformation since the two areas into which, ostensibly, literary knowledge could be incorporated (personality theory and the practice and theory of psychotherapy) are not constituted in such a way that such incorporation is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a literary critique of the novel "Pedro Páramo" by Mexican author Juan Rulfo for the 50th anniversary of its publication. It examines the major themes of the novel, including Rulfo's use of realism and hope. The author also provides a study of the main characters in the work and what they represent. The influence of the novel on Mexican literature and media is explored. Several references to other criticism on the work are also presented.

The article discusses the competition between the novels "Gone With the Wind," by Margaret Mitchell, and "God's Little Acre," by Erskine Caldwell. It presents a comparison of the representation of Southern States by each author. Moreover, it analyzes the social and the political implications of these works. According to the author, the representation of the South in "Gone With the Wind" has achieved complete hegemony in the U.S. popular culture. Despite this success, the author argues that "God's Little Acre" has significantly challenged "Gone With the Wind."

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.

Women in legal situations are repeatedly associated in Renaissance drama with doublespeak, law-tricks, and sexual intrigue on the one hand, and a sense of mystery and ritualistic self-presentation on the other. Far from denoting a transition to fantasy or to fairy-tale law, this fictionality speaks to specific legal realities behind the discomfort with female litigants in early modern culture, and the specific, but often non-quantifiable, role they played in the operations of law. This essay argues for the use of literature as evidence for the reconstruction of the human and social experience of law in areas where legal documents are silent on the details that we, as historians of perception, are most interested in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Dean Howells was committed to determining what would inspire people from different economic, political, and religious backgrounds to imagine each other as respected members of a human community. Scholars have debated whether his realist aesthetic was suited to do that. Some have argued that realism works to contain the lower classes, and others have argued that it portrays a heterogeneous society in which social problems can be solved through human negotiation between the middle classes and others. Scholars have not, however, addressed how Howells performs the necessary shift in his fiction from a space in which characters focus on their own interests to a space in which they seek to enact justice through negotiating with disparate people. This article identifies and names what enacts the necessary shift: the literary device of accident. In Howells's fiction chance meetings, feelings of accidental connection, and injuries during travel force his middle-class characters into understanding labor politics, slum dwellers, and morally compromised millionaires. His use of accident changes over time, from The Undiscovered Country (1880) to Annie Kilburn (1889) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). This essay traces that change in order to reflect on the democratic and antidemocratic implications of Howells's realist aesthetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenges the dominant modes of reading American realism through an analysis of William Dean Howell's fiction as a whole. Tyrannical side of Sewell character in 'The Rise of Silas Lapham'; Sewell's displaced position in 'The Minister's Charge.'