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The title character of Sabbath's Theater (1995) is a noted iconoclast. Most treatments of Sabbath's character attempt to reconcile his social deviance with his traumatic past--the death of his brother in war, his lover to cancer, and his first wife in absentia. Implied in these readings is a surprising truth about Sabbath: he is, despite himself, a traditionalist. This essay argues that Sabbath (like Roth) is committed to the conventions of literary realism, but this commitment is tested throughout the novel; realist techniques continually fail to address Sabbath's grief, revealing their aesthetic and affective limits. Sabbath's Theater is thus a sustained critique of the very form in which it is written--an airing of grievances with literary realism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Literature / Primerjalna Književnost is the property of Slovenian Comparative Literature Association 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.)

This study contributes to the critical analysis of selected children's literature by highlighting the experiences of mothers in Philippine society. It aims to identify the occupational roles of mothers and their family members' social identities, exploring their connection to maternal experiences. Utilizing content analysis, 11 Filipino children's books from 2009 to 2016 were selected and examined based on an eclectic conceptual framework comprising literary realism, feminist literary criticism, and intersectionality theory focusing on gender and class. Findings reveal that the intersection of mothers' identified social identities and those of their families, along with their social class, affect the overall experiences of mothers. Hence, this analysis aids in understanding the social representation of characters, benefiting classrooms by enhancing comprehension of learner diversity and improving reading competencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines George Eliot's poetry and its relationship to her prose. While some critics argue that her poetry lacks the transcendent quality of true poetry, the article suggests that Eliot's poetry is informed by idealist aesthetics and aims to transcend the boundaries of prose writing. It explores Eliot's knowledge of various theories of art and her idealist conception of the genesis of art in her biblical poem "The Legend of Jubal." The article also suggests that Eliot's understanding of poetry is influenced by German Idealist philosophers like Hegel. Overall, Eliot's poetry seeks to unite feeling and thought, form and content, in order to embody higher truth and achieve a deeper understanding of reality. [Extracted from the article]

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]

This article argues that Emile Habiby's The Pessoptimist (1974) reinvented the Palestinian novel within a new literary genre, post-realism. Habiby's masterpiece employs a complex, noncommittal narrative that in many ways defies, even eludes understanding, and this is its strength. In order to make the narrative more approachable, this paper attempts to contextualise the novel within a postmodern sub-genre, post-realism, making its more subtle and hidden meanings and dimensions reveal themselves. To this end, the article begins by defining realism and post-realism as literary terms and then pinpoints several key post-realist moments in this highly elusive novel. To deepen the analysis, narrative strategies employed in the novel are compared and contrasted to a similar postmodernist novel, Ralph Waldo Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). Ultimately, the article contributes to developing a new sub-genre, post-realism, within the main, mother genre of postmodernism, which can not only be seen as a reinvention of the Palestinian novel, but also be used widely in literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Realism movement of 19th century Western literature is a significant literary phenomenon with far-reaching influence on global literary history. In the context of Chinese literature and culture, it holds a preeminent position due to its depth and extent. Nevertheless, the meaning and reception of Realism has been a subject of considerable controversy, complexity, and variation. Professor Jiang Chengyong's latest publication, Research on Western Literary Trends in the 19th Century Vol. 2: Realism, adopts an innovative academic perspective and employs cutting-edge ideas and methods to undertake a thorough examination and interpretation of this literary trend. The book aims to uncover the original features of Realism and put forward a set of innovative perspectives that substantially enrich and expand the existing body of research in this field in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the representation of the female body in the short story O ponto do marido (The husband stitches) by Carmen Maria Machado. The author uses aesthetic resources that invite the reader to become physically involved with the text, in addition to resorting to mise en abyme to bring American popular stories of female bodies in tragic situations. This will be thought of as corps en abyme. Based on the idea that literature itself is a body, the argument is that the denial of what is canonical in the body-text is intertwined with the radicalization of the female body in writing by female authors such as Carmen Maria Machado's. This reading will be based on Feminist Theory (CONBOY et al., 1997) and Feminist Literary Criticism (FELSKI, 2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many literary critics have tried to prove that there is only one Brontë and that is Emily Brontë, who was a genius among the other two sisters, many readers are of the opinion that the three sisters, Emily, Charlotte, and Anne have written novels of the same type but with varying success. This assumption is natural and reasonable, because life gave them the same inclination to write, while they, as sisters, were closely related to each other at home and in the family. For the student and the critic, the case of these three sisters is challenging, because life seldom gives the same tendency to the three who were of the same blood and of the same generation, and who wrote novels of the same form, but relying in three different experiences (Long, 514-515). The novel "Wuthering Heights" is a kind of tragedy in the framework of realism, a work which, through concretely and convincingly presented characters of a place and time, speaks about the all-human and eternal theme: about the conflict of the free energy of the human being with conventions and codes and material interests that prevent it. The composition of this novel is its best artistic feature. To write the novel, Emily starts from the end of the events. Looking back, she unfolds the events first through the testimony of the witnesses and then through the narrator. Thus, none of the narrators is a tool of the novel's technique, but they give the impression that they are living people with different qualities and characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By concluding her study with Kafka's anti-realist novel, Weitzman emphasizes the broader aesthetic claims that exceed the confines of realism. Reading Holz's I Papa Hamlet i (1889) and his little known I Die Blechschmiede i (1902) together, Weitzman shows how the previously hidden leitmotif of obscenity in realism becomes crystal clear in naturalism. Even though Benn's writing comes closest to what we today commonly understand as obscenity, Weitzman reads his poetry as "fake" naturalism (136), simply evoking truth rather than the plain objectivity that naturalism purports to proffer. [Extracted from the article]

In his essay, Moraru contends that Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 is a breakthrough in Romanian literary historiography and criticism overall. According to Moraru, the History revisits radically the terms of the Romantic contract that, in Romania and elsewhere, has typically been underwriting modern criticism. A form of critical realism and an exemplar of postmillennial Romanian literary and cultural studies, Iovănel’s book is, in Moraru’s view, not only provocative but also effectively transformative. To gauge the scope and nature of the changes advocated and enacted in the History, this article examines how Iovănel has put together what he calls the “system” of contemporary Romanian literature. Thus, Moraru is less concerned with which writers are included in the book and which are left out, seeking, instead, answers to a series of questions concerning primarily Iovănel’s cultural-materialist and transnational studies-informed methodology. Along the same theoretical, historical, and political lines, Moraru discusses the project’s makeup as well as the strength of the case the History makes for the need to have another look at a range of pre- and post-1990 literary movements, directions, styles, and authors, principally at postmodernism and its competition and successors in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author examines aspects of "Middlemarch," a 19th century novel by the British writer George Eliot. In the author's opinion "Middlemarch" seeks to document failure, weariness and the limits of possibilities. The central focus of the article is on "Middlemarch," Eliot, and the expression of literary and psychological realism. A number of topics are addressed including Eliot's aesthetic and ethical positions, realism and sympathy, and the degree to which sympathy can be limited.

Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (2006) is a lofty- 900-page literary showpiece that explores, with a devastating realism, themilieu of thebustling "cityofdreams"- Bombay. Partly Dickensian and partly The Godfather in its purview, the bookchmnicles the story ofthe city's criminal mastermind and a lacklustre policeman, set against the backdrop of the glamour of Bollywood and the tension oflndo-Pak violence. The paper will, however, attempt to examine as to how this social novel is mow than just a crime saga or detective thriller by also candidly conjuring the vulgarity - both physical and psychological - of Bombay's crowded and impoverished population as the Zeitgeist. Given the fact that the novelprobes into religious polarisation, corruption, prejudice, and pofiticala pathy while paintinga not-so-pretty picture of the Indian society, it becomes imperativetoalsoexplorehowitt engageswithprecarious living in a fragile environment with the spectre of nuclear ter/vrism looming large and the heart-wrenching violence of the 1947 Partition behind us. The manner in which Chandra works out the complex political and social anxieties, thatweasa nation have been experienc ingsincethe '90s, is worthy of critical attention. [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]

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.

To Gleb Uspenskii's contemporaries, his preference for short forms like sketches, notes, and fragments masked an artistic flaw - his inability to produce a novel. The paper reconsiders Uspenskii's generic choices as a deliberate critique of the novel form. This critique reflected Uspenskii's anxiety about the significance of individual personality and experience overvalued by the novel. Uspenskii's aspiration to transcend the novel's preoccupation with an individual human fate in order to lay bare the conditions shaping the shared destiny of all led him to exchange the novel's "microscopic" optics for a broader, panoramic lens. Such change in perspective dictated several other elements of his poetics: from rejecting the novel's aesthetics of small detail to reconfiguring the traditional character structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is primarily concerned with interconnections between forms of impegno (political engagement) and aesthetic choices, as they were articulated in the literary and cultural journal Officina. In order to reassess the role of Officina within the Italian cultural and political debate of the day, this article considers two main narratives unfolding in the journal: the aesthetic rejection of Novecentismo, understood as the epitome of artistic autonomy, and the articulation of a form of Marxist impegno suitable for a neo-capitalist society and stemming from the class-based idea of the organic intellectual. Using published and unpublished correspondence, we argue that Officina had a pivotal role in producing a theoretical framework for the conceptualisation of a post-neorealist idea of Marxist critical analysis as well as of intellectual, aesthetic and political engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism of the autonomous construct of characters by George Eliot in her book "Middlemarch" in contrast to the paradox of realism is presented. Topics included are the examination of the double-leveled aesthetic experience in fiction by critic Peter J. Rabinowitz, the illusion of character life details beyond the boundaries of the narrative, and the shifts in character perspectives for protagonists Tertius Lydgate, Rosamond Vincy and Nicholas Bulstrode.

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]

Although William Dean Howells is a canonical American novelist and one of the foremost theorists of American literary realism, his later phase receives little scholarly attention. In this period, Howells experiences the negative effects of the rapidly changing literary marketplace on both the artist and the literary critic, realizes the defining force of the advertiser on literary taste, and revises his own artistic status, which he now calls "prosperous slavery to a salary." Ironically, the epithet 'Dean of American Letters' is bestowed upon him in this final period, rendering Howells's private literary self more at odds with his public literary persona which has assumed iconic properties. In this analysis, Howells's selected later fiction and non-fiction will be considered. Many of his later critical essays will help define his literary program in the twentieth century as he confronts the modern literary marketplace. This confrontation, in the manner of an intellectual, moral, and artistic crisis, must frame any investigation of what constitutes the belatedness of later Howells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of Ezequiel Martínez Estrada's Around Kafka and other essays allows to recognize the concept of realism (inherited from the Czech author) that he manages in his narratives. In " Marta Riquelme," one of his stories, he discursively constructs an image of "the other" upon different textual levels: author, narrator, genre, characters, etc. A t the same time, Martinez Estrada manifests a feeling of foreignness in the production of his real and fictional contexts, that is, in the creation of particular texts. The findings show that this writer presents a personal image of "the different" when related to the conception of traditional narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented of the 1889 American fictional book "A Hazard of New Fortunes," by William Dean (W.D.) Howells. Particular focus is given to the book's realistic portrayal of sacrifice, including the mutilation of book's character U.S. veteran Berthold Lindau's body resulting from his participation in the U.S. Civil War.

A literary criticism is presented on the 1889 American novel "A Hazard of New Fortunes," by William Dean (W.D.) Howells. Particular focus is given to the realistic aspects of the novel, including in regard to the observations of reality and perceptions of the real. An overview of the author's use of a narrator in "A Hazard of New Fortunes" is provided.

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]

An essay is presented on the essay "Reflections on Writing" by Henry Miller, within the context of Miller's own literary criticism. Topics include Miller's biographical precedent stated to illuminate the parameters of a writer's medium, problematizing realism in literature by way of the issue of transference and art, and the process of writing, for Miller, appears to be signified as mechanical.

Until a flourishing of scholarship in the last decade, the writer Champfleury had been banished to relative obscurity. In this article, I examine what we can learn from Champfleury's recent rescue, and what it suggests about the hybridity of realism. Close readings of specific works by Champfleury demonstrate how his texts play with seeming contradictions and this very self-conscious play encourages us to rethink our entire understanding of realism, even in its most "naïve" state. Furthermore, all of Champfleury's work illustrates how realism became a relative term, able to pivot across the very categories it helped to establish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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]

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]

An essay is presented in which the author describes the state of novels since the 1990s, and discusses the debate over whether or not the novel is an obsolete literary genre. Italian narrative fiction, realism in literature, and the relationship between literature and politics are discussed, as well as the attitudes of authors such as Bruno Arpaia. The novel "Anatomía de un istante" by Javier Cercas and authors such as Dorrit Cohn are cited, and the relationship between novels and ethics is mentioned.

A literary criticism of the books "No Great Mischief," "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood," and the short story "The Closing Down of Summer" by Alistair MacLeod is presented. The criticism looks at concepts from these works including neoliberalism, realism, and regionalism. Other topics include the Maritime region of Canada, migrant laborers, and the concept of family.

This essay takes Doris Lessing's criticism of the 'Angry Young Men', and traces her account of them in relation to commitment in writing, politics, and relationships in The Golden Notebook. Moving away from the neo-realism of the 1950s to postmodern realism in The Golden Notebook, she integrated political, intellectual, and emotional layers, insisting on their commensurability. The essay then considers B. S. Johnson as 'guilty' of the bounded provincialism that Lessing derided, and suggests that both wrote from similar instincts in mapping commitment, form, and experience; that however 'bounded' Johnson's writing appears to be, it too integrates private experience with public and global events. The essay argues that both writers' work turns on questions of intimacy, both formal and experiential, and that attention to their interest in intimacy opens up alternative ways of looking at a period sometimes dulled by the critical generalizations that it produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the rhetoric of author Erich Auerbach's work "Mimesis." It demonstrates three interrelated points that might salvage Auerbach's criticism from its place in the literary critical canon. It shows that Auerbach has constructed a specific method for literary understanding, with the hermeneutics stemming from his preoccupation with figural interpretation. Auerbach's figural hermeneutics, a thoroughly modernist critical point of view, is considered.

Copyright of Australian Journal of French Studies (Liverpool University Press / Journals) is the property of Liverpool University Press / Journals 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.)

The article discusses the depiction of the 1992 Los Angeles riots in the science fiction novel "The Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler. The relationship between genre and the perception of realism by readers and critics is discussed, and competing versions of the events in Los Angeles are described.

Presents literary criticism of the novel "New Grub Street" by George Gissing, particularly focusing on its realism and its portrayal of characters who are authors trying to write realistic novels themselves. The difference between realism and naturalism is examined. It is argued that the writers in "New Grub Street" are not figures to idolize, but artistic failures, and that their lack of success is a sign that the realist novel of the Victorian period is dying and will be replaced by naturalist fiction.

In this article the authors present a brief commentary on critical approaches to a form of science fiction known as slipstream. They discuss perspectives on slipstream and questions whether decisions about the formation of a slipstream genre are based on the form, content, or iconography of a work of literature. Topics include dominant genres, residual genres, and the definition of slipstream, a term coined by science fiction author Bruce Sterling.

The article discusses the translation of the works of Emily Dickinson. It talks about the criticism of her works by Jorge de Sena. It discusses the assessment of her poems. It discusses the link of Emily with modernist Anglo-American poetry. It also focuses on the reception of Emily in Portugal. It discusses the concept of neorealism.

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 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 focuses on fiction from the 1960s to 2010. Major works in American fiction of the past four decades were attributed to Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison. Technical innovation and new thematic depth dominated the period. Using Pynchon and Morrison as standards, scholars in previous years have traced the dialectic from mannered realism to self-consciously antimimetic experimentation and back to a realism more comfortable with interrogations of its ethical and aesthetic base.

A literary criticism of the book "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes is presented. The work is examined in light of the concepts of representation, reality, and imitation. Topics include mimetic representation, the role of communication in representation, and the role of games and cruelty in the novel's portrayal of representation. Also discussed are the novel's ducal characters, such as knights, duchesses, and dukes, and types of game-playing in the novel, including methectic play.