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This essay centers around a comparative reading of William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes and Frank Norris's McTeague. Its main goal is to contextualize Norris's attempts to promote what he understood to be literary naturalism—positioned against the "well-behaved ordinary bourgeois" realism of Howells—and to show how he connected the idea of 'the literary' to the postbellum world of professional labor. In as much as other established professions already regulated the practice of work according to internally ratified standards of quality postbellum writers too sought to render the practice of writing objectifiable by appeal to standards of evaluation that were approved by experts within their own community a "brotherhood of novelists" in the words of James. [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.)

George Sand's Indiana and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth share a guiding interest in the function of appearances that--considered within the context of literary realism's development--can be seen as contributing to the gradually dominating trope of exteriority in which fictional characters' identities and actions are ineluctably determined and defined by such external forces as society, language, aesthetics, and commerce. The failure of Sand's Raymon de Ramière and Wharton's Lily Bart to realize themselves as independently empowered individuals exemplifies literary realism's reassessment, closely tied to the rise of sociology as a discipline, of the longstanding, romantic tradition of a person's potential to be a selfdetermining entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Ben Lerner's novel 10:04 (2014) employs "implicated realism" to represent the environmentalism of the rich. Implicated realism is a self-reflexive aesthetic that reveals how the foundations of literary realism—narrative description, bourgeois settings, an emphasis on daily life—rely upon the forms of exploitation that have also produced the climate crisis. I demonstrate that implicated realism in 10:04 , paradoxically, consists of both hyperrealism and realist failure. Lerner's novel applies hyperrealist description to seemingly innocuous scenes, uncovering their implication in the uneven distribution of environmental harm. Such hyperrealism exists alongside realist failure, which 10:04 both thematizes and performs. Through realist failure, then, implicated realism confronts the compromised history of realism and its association with possessive individualism and extractive capitalism. Consequently, although many ecocritics discount realism's ability to represent climate change, this essay identifies implicated realism as a self-reflexive and adaptive mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid mounting discourse on contemporary literary realism in international academia, Wang Shouren, a leading Chinese scholar of foreign literature stands out as a championing figure in marshalling the recent academic turn to realism in China. In the past few decades, he has made unremitting endeavor towards constructing a systematic body of knowledge regarding literary realism. Weaving his way through voluminous scholarship on realism and histories of the 20th century and contemporary literature, he proposes a set of keywords (truth, mimesis, reality, fiction) and pathways (cognitive, aesthetic, affective, intermedial) to set up the theoretic foundation of realism for more meaningful academic exploration. At the same time, being a historian of postwar foreign literature, he teases out a steady strain of realism running through a variety of postmodern literary texts--first mainly sourced from postwar Anglo-American literature and later from a much wider scope of world literature including contemporary Chinese authors. As a result, Wang Shouren's outlook on realism extends both along the global and local axes towards a glocalized perception of literary realism as a pluralistic form open to proliferation and permutation in the remapping of the world literary system. In particular, his Chinese identity equips him with a distinct Chinese scope of view which consists in Chinese perspective, Chinese stance, Chinese insights and Chinese resources, enabling him to be an outstanding spokesperson for realism's contemporary manifestations in world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research aims to explain symbolic realism in literary texts by reviewing and critically examining symbolic realism, while explaining three important aspects of symbolic realism epistemology. For this purpose, the possibility of connecting realism with anti-realism and presentationism in symbolic realism and the semantic system of symbolic realism was investigated in three parts of the situational context of symbolic realism. Symbolic realism is known as both an artistic technique and a style. Since the term "symbolic realism" is not properly recognized in literary and artistic circles of Iran, the necessity of this research was felt. As a result, symbolic realism grew in contexts where the connection between language and reality became more prominent and, on the other hand, symbols were used simultaneously with the departure from photographic realism. Another thing is that the possibility of interaction between realism and anti-realism was investigated, the result is that in the studied periods, we can witness the influence of realism from anti-realism and presentationism in the use of symbolic realism, although these links can be traced, but symbolic realism itself maintains an independent structure. It passes through the dry and monotonous approach of pure realism and achieves a broad and multi-meaning system. In the third part, while confirming and explaining the polysemous system of symbolic realism, its difference with other polysemous systems was determined and the position of the symbol in symbolic realism was analyzed. It goes further and an independent semantic pattern can be drawn for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction situates the contributions to the New Agenda in the context of an apparent resurgence of the term 'provincial' and 'provincialism' in Britain since the Brexit debates and the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. It takes the resurgence of provincial thinking as an invitation to explore the cultural history of provincialism in Victorian Britain and the unexpected part it played in the formation of Empire. By revaluing the cultural formation of provincialism through this historical lens the articles in this New Agenda help us see the roots of its power now and the alternative possibilities latent within it. Although provincialism emerged as a fraught and politically charged term during the nineteenth century it was also a means to expand access to print and material cultures to those previously excluded. At the same time as provincialism became a pejorative term in the hands of liberal critics such as Matthew Arnold, nineteenth-century Britain was powered by industry, intellectual enquiry, and newspapers emanating from non-metropolitan towns and cities. The provincial press and provincial fiction are crucial ways in which Victorian Britain represented itself as an entity composed of distinctive constituent regions and imagined itself as an imperial power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Haddis Alemayehu's classic novel ፍቅር እስከ መቃብር (Fikir iske Mekabir , Love until Death , 1958 Ethiopian Calendar, 1965/6 Gregorian Calendar), is lauded by critics as a pioneering realist and modern novel in the Amharic literary tradition. My aim in this article is to scrutinize this take by examining the novel's narrative temporalities and modes through a dialectical lens. This leads me to argue that the novel's realism is marked by contradiction and fluidity. Specifically, the emergence of realism in Fikir iske Mekabir is accompanied by its breakdown while the realist narrative mode is accompanied by the traditional narrative modes of epic and hagiography (or, gedl). This hitherto unexamined textual and intertextual quality of Haddis's novel reveals new insights into its thematic content regarding modernity, tradition, and social reproduction under the old Ethiopian order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns have been written by The Afghan-American author, "Khaled Hosseini" in 2003 and 2007, respectively. In his work, political, social and cultural situation of Afghanistan are of utmost mportance, and the themes of friendship and family relations, love and betrayal, courage and fear, war and rape and migration are highlighted. In addition to using strong realistic components such as expressing social and historical facts, typical characterization, detailed description of personalities and environments, naturalistic components such as disaster and ugliness, inheritance and environment algebra, sexual issues, and the use of characters Static and passive naturalism have also been noticed. It is also noteworthy that, in both novels, betrayal and rape are the two themes that are initially presented. Concerns such as civil and foreign wars and ethnic strife are a part of Afghanistan's history. The first novel, therefore, is realistic, however, the author’s focus on these issues and ignoring other aspects of life, escaping the problems for which no solution is provided, taking refuge in the safe haven of the West, strengthens the naturalistic aspect of this novel. The most important reason for the presence of naturalistic components in such novels is the unsettled political situation of Afghanistan in the time period of the story. In the second novel, with the war ending and Afghanistan reviving, the element of hope is evident. Considering the historical background of Afghanistan, it is assumed that, despite the naturalistic aspects, a strong realist dimension is still remained in Khaled Hosseini’s work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes a poetological approach to the thematising of everyday life and its connections with the poetics of the "effect of the real". Methodologically, it is part of the research concept of the new poetics. On the material of a canonical text of Slovak literary realism -- the novella "Neprebudený" ([The unawakened] 1886) by Martin Kukučín (1860 -- 1928) --, it identifies poetological characteristics of the novella, reveals its existential parameters, and points to the place of M. Kukučín in the ironic-polemical line of modern Slovak prose. This innovative approach allows for identification in the structure of the text the tradition of the poetics of grotesque realism as conceptualised by M. M. Bakhtin on the folk culture of the Middle Ages and the literature of the European Renaissance. The identification of elements of the poetics of the grotesque in the text of the novella is based on the emphasis of this poetics on the shape/surface of the phenomena of the life world, especially the human body. Therefore, the starting point of the interpretation of the novella as outlined here is description as the basic stylistic procedure of realistic texts -- the description of the character in this case. The description and subsequent interpretation of the image of the grotesque body makes it possible to identify the presence of the poetics of discrete irony as a key strategy of authorial narration in the text of the novella. [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]

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]

This analysis situates Charlotte Brontë's narrative representation of performance venues and stagecraft in Villette (1853) within the architectural and social histories of nineteenth-century British theater. Emphasis on the spatial elements of theatrical venues and the spectacular lighting and stage effects afforded by these structures contributes to critical examinations of the novel's many instances of performance. The role played by theaters in the production of national identity, consumer culture, and conventional femininity highlights their social dynamics as experienced by Lucy Snowe, providing semiotically rich sites of cultural critique. Lucy's alienation from her fellow audience members disrupts the projections of cultural unity and collectivity fostered by nineteenth-century theaters, just as recasting stage effects as gothic tropes disrupts the potential marriage plot. Ultimately, Villette's narrative representations of theatrical realism critique both the limitations of mid-century literary realism and the inhospitality of public spaces to single, middle-class women who resist the conventional role prescribed by their gender and class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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]

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]

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]

Copyright of Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature is the property of Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature Editorial Office 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 article explores the abiding relevance of Croce's last book in the philosophy of history, which, due its publication during the war has always been neglected. After discussing the context of Croce's antagonism to the anti-historicist tendencies of his own times, the book is interpreted as theoretical underpinning of Croce's 'ethico-political' histories by which he sought to close the gap between historical thinking and action. This he does on the basis of a sophisticated realist ontology, which is still relevant for contemporary philosophy of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the twentieth century was that of phenomenology, the twenty-first is characterized by the rise of multiple realisms. Although one might think that this is a radical turn in contemporary philosophy, it should be remembered that, in 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre tried to establish an absolute neorealism which wanted to preserve a certain realism within phenomenology. Through a reading of Being and nothingness, the author shows that absolute neorealism enables the dichotomy between idealism and realism to be surpassed, thanks to the transphenomenality of two beings and, in addition, imposes a displacement of the descriptive and constitutive task of phenomenology towards a work of revelation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim. The aim of the study is to clarify the internal complexity of the Slovak literary realist discourse and its diverse relations to the heterogeneous artistic, cultural and ideological discourses of the last third of the 19th century. The emphasis is placed on the appropriation and adaptation of stimuli from other social systems, as well as on the specific literary operations that modify literary realism as an artistic discourse constructing an intelligible world in a cultural sense. Methods. As a theoretical concept, realism is defined as a type of representation or representation technique associated with a set of textual conventions, complex referential and self-referential figures. As a literary-historical discourse and event situated in a particular moment of history, realism is governed by period-specific cultural operations and related principles of selecting, evaluating and connecting the phenomena forming the horizon of reality. Only with this dichotomy, the multiplicity of paradoxes, syncretism and heterogeneous character of Slovak literary realism can be captured. The theory of social systems (Luhmann, 1995, 2000) allows for a more complex view of realist literature as an autopoietic system in the context of modern society, which itself is viewed as a system of communications differentiated into a network of separate social subsystems interrelated by the medium of language. Finally, the theory of fictional worlds proposes selective and formative operations that explicate the construction of the realist fictional world and the stratification of its functions (Fořt, 2014). Results and conclusion. Among the configurational relations of Slovak literary realism, the concept of ideal realism is highlighted as a model of literary aesthetics that flexibly interacted with the discourse of national revival to provide an adequate expression of contemporary Slovak cultural and national interests. Two literary aesthetic modifications of ideal realism (creative and voluntarist, developed by Svetozár Hurban Vajanský, and deterministic, represented in the prose works of Martin Kukučín) are analysed in detail in order to show the inner complexity of the literary realist discourse and to manifest its semantic multidimensionality in the 1880s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Putu Shanty was one of Bali's leading intellectuals in the middle of the twentieth century, but he has been effaced from official publications identifying cultural leaders of the island. His short stories, written in a social realist style, were intended as interventions that would influence the course of history but are also a valuable record of historical discourse. 'Anti-feudalism' was a central discursive concern of Shanty's, and while it was shared on a national level with other political leaders and writings, its implications on Bali were highly specific, involving local social contestation and attempts to redefine religion. The role of intellectuals such as Shanty demonstrates that there are significant differences between discourses of the 1950s and the early-twenty-first-century constitution of 'tradition'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the specific realism deployed in To Live (1993), Yu Hua's description of the struggles of the spoiled son of a wealthy landowner transformed into a kindhearted peasant after the revolution. The analysis shows how narrative technique and Yu Hua's active interventions in his narrative affect the novel. Originally banned in China, it was later called one of the nation's most influential books. Three main themes within the novel are highlighted, that of violence and death, the role of spiritual cynicism, and the general humanism pervading the narrative. Five types of narrative operations are at play in To Live: the use of a dual voice, the invention of unique plot patterns, the mechanism of anachrony, the recourse to metalanguage, and the technique of double-voiced discourse. The ultimate purpose of this expanded realism is to make readers understand the world thanks to embodied experiences of language and not just by following a sequence of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes that we understand Vernon Lee's debut novel, Miss Brown (1884), as enacting a theory of literary language's constructive potency that Lee develops in her critical essays. Those critical essays offer a vibrant nineteenth-century formalism, suggesting how fiction constructs and formalizes our realities, shaping readers' mental and emotional circuits as it arranges phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In Miss Brown, Lee crafts a prose style that meticulously tracks the protagonist's formation--the "little dramas of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment, . . . of tensions and relaxations"--rendering that formation as a drama of sentence-level structuration. The resulting "representation" of Anne Brown is interrupted with adjective-rich stretches conspicuously geared toward defining, formulating, and theorizing what is being represented, essay-like. By treating the protagonist as an occasion to foreground syntax's active building and abstracting, Miss Brown's prose partakes in the kind of literary practice that has recently been described as nonmimetic realism--realism that does more than denote and refer and reflect what is, and instead performs, meditating on form's process, to project and inform new potentialities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Synergies Mexique is the property of GERFLINT (Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches pour le Francais Langue Internationale) 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.)

Near the turn of the twentieth century, William Dean Howells, the most fervent promoter of literary realism in America, serialized a romance trilogy, the Altrurian romances. Since they so conspicuously conflict with Howells's other novels and his many programmatic statements about the value of literary realism, these anomalous tales have continued to pose a problem for critics. In contrast to past interpretations of the romances—which either try to explain away their differences or argue that Howells lost faith in realism—this essay contends that the romances constitute a strategic move on Howells's part to support the cause of realism in the midst of "the romance revival" afoot in both the U.S. and England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vijay Tendulkaris knownforhis writings that are true to life. Ghasiram Kotwal, a play in Marathi that deals with multiple themes such theme of avenge, the political system of India, and alike. Yet, a different underlying aspect is also mvealed in the drama, theme of Realism and deterioration in the position of woman. This paperdeals with the meaning of Real is mandits implication on drama, Ghasiram Kotwal The paper deals with various pivblems like object ijication, subjugation and repiession that are political, economic andsocialin the lifeofa woman with Realism asthe centre of interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an appraisal of how Bernard Shaw, as an intellectualist, being religious in the board sense, formulated a personal philosophy of creative evolution based on secular theories and how Shaw focused on social, democratic and personal problems in his early plays and later he introduced themes such as religion, youth and age, labour and capital, etc. After a deep analysis of all his plays, this paper explains or depicts how Shaw was a practical mystic who saw no remedy in economic socialism or anything else other than developing ones spiritual life. [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]

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]

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]

This paper analyses the representations of the Thousand Days' War from three tales by Efe Gómez: "Un padre de la Patria", "18 de Octubre" and "Peralonso". The tales are analyzed in their direct relation with the historic context, employing historiographical works. A critical posture of the bipartisan Colombian history is found alongside with the idea of war as a downfall and deadlock of the nation, and also an ethical way of thinking about the Colombian nation. Those elements show not only a thematic, but also a conceptual unity among them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper regards the discourse of modernity in realist literature by studying the conception of human as an indicator in the systematization of literary processes through the depiction of relations between generations in the early prose by the 'iconic' representative of Latvian realist literature Andrejs Upīts who is treated as a contradictory writer due to his socio-political positioning. The paper produces the analysis of the projection of early 20th century processes of modernity in literature: understanding of the identity of peasants and town dwellers, mobility of the population in Latvia, the impact of the technical progress on humans' lifestyle, relations between generations, stereotypes of the family and their deconstruction, men's and women's roles in the society. Under the impact of modernity, Latvian realist and modernist writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries actualize a range of typologically similar themes and motifs often using a similar set of poetic means. This proves that it is not productive to strictly separate the poetics of realism and Modernism in the works by Latvian authors of this time period. This approach was accepted in the soviet occupation period under the influence of pseudo-Marxist criticism. Early works by Upīts previously labelled as realist samples display many features of Modernism, especially in the depiction of processes of modernity. It would be more appropriate to admit that in the works by many Latvian authors of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries features of realism and Modernism coexist and correlate. This may be accounted for by both the authors' willingness of making it possible to readers, by portraying the lives of their contemporaries in a manner of realism, to identify with the characters and events depicted in texts and thus address a wide range of Latvian readers and by a need of a creative personality to constantly improve one's individual style of narration by poetic innovations of the age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]