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In marking 200 years since Jane Austen died, this paper comes as a personal testimony of how I as a reader became more familiar with the person behind the name. Furthermore, it is the somewhat hidden, somewhat obvious intention of this paper to awake in Austen fans a desire to visit the place she lived in while writing her masterpieces and also the last place to have had her mark while she was alive and healthy. The effect will be inevitably the same as always; Jane Austen will become just Jane, my friend, that author I met once but cannot remember having shaken her hand, yet still she is familiar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reprint of the article which appeared in the Summer 1988 issue is presented in which the author offers a criticism of the work of the African American author Henry Dumas including "Ark of Bones," "Jonah and the Green Stone," and "Rope of Wind.". He discusses Dumas' use of style, the appropriateness of his settings, and the realism that he achieved in his works.

The author presents a criticism of African American literature from a Marxist perspective. She discusses what constitutes Marxist criticism, the African American authors she views as Marxist, and the realism in African American writing that appeals to Marxist theory.

My purpose is to give continuity to an argument previously suggested by some readers of Blest Gana. The general idea is associated with the need of a study capable of establishing a link between all of the renowned books, as a way of integrating them in the work as a whole in an organic way and with a general vision. In this case, I take the seven novels which the author published between 1860 and 1864 to show some of the relationships that can be established between them. [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]

Copyright of Enthymema is the property of Enthymema, International Journal of Literary Criticism, Literary Theory & Philosophy of Literature 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 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]

In this article, I argue that Ennio Flaiano's Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, 1947) is both the first Italian postcolonial novel and a highly complex literary work that should be acknowledged as a major text of twentieth-century literature. I discuss the hermeneutic function of parodic intertextuality in Tempo di uccidere, and its relationship with Dante's Commedia. Tempo di uccidere not only subverts many tenets of neorealism (and may therefore in some respects be compared to Italo Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno), but it also exposes the violence inherent in the realist novel as a mode of representation. The article shows how Flaiano highlights hermeneutic issues of misreading, misrepresentation, and the violent erasure of the other, ironically prophesizing its own misreading by critics. Critics and readers have in fact - the article shows - consistently misrepresented, obfuscated, or glossed over the rape and murder of an Ethiopian woman that Flaiano unequivocally places at the centre his text. Tempo di uccidere is a multilevelled, modernist and ultimately postmodernist and allegorical text that - well before Edward Said articulated his own critique - disavows the violence of the realist novel and its complicity with European imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay recovers a once celebrated but now forgotten Filipino novel in English, Juan Cabreros Laya’s His Native Soil (1941), which marked the emergence of realism during the Philippine Commonwealth’s slow, decade-long transition to independence from the United States. Whereas the novel was originally praised as a landmark text in Philippine literature in English, His Native Soil was later dismissed by postwar critics as an imitative, formally flawed, and stylistically inferior work. Taking up Roberto Schwarz’s challenge to advance a reading practice that takes into account the difference between literature and social structure in the colonial periphery, I argue that rather than viewing His Native Soil ’s improbabilities of plot and tonal dissonances as artistic flaws, they are more meaningfully read as the author’s attempt to adapt the realist protocols of the bildungsroman to capture the double-edged nature of independence: the adoption of a trade policy that would economically bind together the Philippines and the United States and that would render political freedom impossible for Filipinos unless relations of colonial dependency were to be continued after independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children’s imagined mobilities are determined by a range of interactions, not least through engagement with fictional stories in which childhood itself is imagined, written and re-written, interpreted and re-interpreted. Too often children’s imagined mobilities are overlooked in favour of more instrumental approaches to their mobilities. Drawing from a spatialised literary tradition and a growing focus on literature in mobility studies, this article poses the possibility that imagined mobilities extend the agency of children in an ‘impossible’ adultist world. [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]

The author explores how intelligence is represented in the works of Henry James an American-born British writer who is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. Presented are a discussion on the epistemological drama staged by the late fiction of James, an analysis of the characters in James' novel "The Spoils of Poynton" and an examination of the nineteenth-century genealogy of the concept of intelligence quotient (IQ).

A literary criticism of the 1750 English novel "The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins" by Robert Paltock is presented. It analyzes the novel's representation of life and the author's practice of realism in writing the novel. The symbolic significance of Peter Wilkins who saves a woman named Youwarkee is explored. Also discussed is the influence of the genre of early modern utopian literature on the novel.

This essay argues that the celebrated realism of Boccaccio's Decameron responds to the new prominence of verisimilitude in legal contexts in his time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the subsequent siege, and Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip, including ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2008/2009 and ‘Operation Protective Edge’ in 2014, it has become difficult to convey the normality of life in Gaza, a normality that is often elusive in a situation that is increasingly defined by the accelerated and technological violence of dromocolonisation, at the same time that it is marked by what Rob Nixon has termed ‘slow violence.’ To make these forms of violence visible and apprehensible, recent short fiction from Gaza has turned to poetic realism and the use of the sensory experience to represent life under siege. Contrary to visceral realism, which promotes a focus on the body as a site of victimhood and suffering, poetic realism allows the short story writers discussed in this article to reclaim agency and to define a Gazan identity that resists the subjection and subjectification of human rights discourses and of the Anglophone media by focusing both on the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of living in Gaza in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the novel "The Castle of Otranto," by Horace Walpole, is presented. Topics include the portrayal of finance and stock markets in the novel, the role of prophecy and fate in light of the novel's significance as a gothic novel, and the distinction between the novel and literary realism. The views of critic Michael McKeon are addressed.

This essay considers the Resistance short stories in Beppe Fenoglio's collection I ventitré giorni della città di Alba, published in 1952. Setting these stories within the historical and cultural context of post-war Italy, it investigates their author's commitment to expressing the "truth" of the experience of the Resistance through fiction. It argues that Fenoglio goes further than his neorealist contemporaries in attempting to do so in the manner in which he depicts a civil war rather than a war of liberation, and in his unsparingly harsh description of certain aspects of partisan behaviour. The essay examines the relationship between Fenoglio's life and his fiction, putting the case that we should draw clear distinctions between the two, without detracting from the truth of the latter. In conclusion, it draws comparisons between the early stories and Fenoglio's later novel, Il partigiano Johnny, where the author was able to capture the heroic qualities of the Resistance alongside his depiction of all its contradictory aspects. [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]

In her article "Paris and the Birth of a Modern Fantastic during the Nineteenth Century" Patricia Garcia discusses the unprecedented growth of Europe's urban centers during the nineteenth century in relation to the realist novel and takes urban and literary Paris as a paradigm. However, nineteenth-century Paris was also to become the epicenter of another narrative form: the fantastic. Garcia's objective is to explore how the modern city fueled the development of the fantastic by combining the literary and urban angle: how do works of the fantastic write the city? What role does the modern city play in the emergence of the fantastic short story? Her argumentation is divided into two parts: the first explores how literature circulated in space while the second focuses on the representations of Paris in nineteenth-century fantastic fiction to demonstrate that with the acceleration of modernity, the fantastic became an urban form of expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The official reality claim of the eighteenth-century novel established itself in sharp distinction from fantastic modes of narration (ancient epics, medieval romances, religious allegories, etc.). Realist narratives following the laws of probability draw on a fictional ontology of contingency that goes back to the Aristotelian definition of the term as “possible” and “not necessary.” The pluralistic poetics of the early novel, thereby, not only participate in the programatically modern project “of a scientific scrutiny of life” (Watt) but also forms an essential part of the modern belief in the self-determined nature of the human subject. By contrast, Gothic realism gains all its attraction by depicting impossible events and actions as “real” and assumed unrealities as “possible.” Gothic novels develop an alternative ontology of contingency that actualizes the real possibility of non-being. Next to Walpole’sCastle of Otranto, I analyze Schiller’sGhost Seer. Schiller’s contagious poetics of mimesis transforms calculable contingencies into the imponderability of sheer accidents. Moreover, it is a tale about the mystery of sociality and about the morally justifiable degree of individual freedom. Within a fictional framework of radical indeterminacy and unexpected novelty, Schiller’s tale calls for an ethics ofabsolutecontingency. It does not content itself with taking the possible for real and the real for non-necessary; instead, its narrative environment calls for a radically situational ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Art of Words / Umjetnost Riječi is the property of Umjetnost Rijeci 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 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 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.

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]

A literary criticism of the book "The Mistress Of Spices" by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, an award-winning author and poet is presented. It outlines a blend of prose and poetry which is cloaked in fantasy and the prologue, with its strong poetic overtone. It explores the realism at the start of the novel; and ends on a positives note-the familiar immigrant tale of dreams, desire, pain and struggle that ends with hope; and also explains the immigrant life.

The essay quickly dismisses the question of realism as a spurious category and unverifiable in terms of language. Moreover – assuming the Wu Ming’s perspective – the point is not represented by the facts, but the mechanisms of communication and inflation of narratives that alter, from an ideological perspective, the perception of the world. Literature takes therefore the responsibility to offer an interpretation that challenges the conformism and the one-sidedness with which reality – history, in particular – is often read, to create a new space of freedom. Wu Ming put in the center of the novel the complexity of history to highlight the ideological readings of which it is the result.

Ján Čajak´s novel The Rovesný Family (1909) was consciously composed as a work set in the present. It widely responded to the current problems of that time but in a way it also took account of the contemporary readers´ preferences and literary genre patterns. Within the framework of the contemporary genre range it employs three types of narrative with three different types of topics/motifs: 1. the ideological narrative (the situation of the national education system in the Hungarian Empire after adpoting the school, so called Appony´s laws in the year 1906, in the inter-ethinc relationship Hungarians – Slovaks), 2. the national narrative (national movements: the renegades versus the nationally aware – as an internal problem of the national community) and 3. the intimite narrative (love and personal, partnership problems). Each of the narratives has a different modality (radical criticism – schematism – sentimentalism) and a different extent of employing the reality, ideality and fiction (realism / documentarism – idealism – fictiousness / literariness). At the same time the narrations in question fall into three genre patterns: 1. the political novel (realistic depiction of the situation in the national education system full of disillusion having a tragic ending), 2. the initiation novel (containing obvious utopian features, initiation of a young person into the national struggle and inflaming him/her for the national issues in an utopian ideal world), 3. the romance (sentimental) novel (accenting the partners´ different ethnicity and social inequality, alternatively similarity of their national beliefs and economic independence and equality of each of the partners). Differentiating between the individual layers discloses the discourse status in Čajak´s prose, demonstrating the stylistic disparity of the individual storylines. The author´s ideological solution lies in questioning the passive approach and celebrating the activity regardless of nationality and moral credit.

"Daisy and Woolf" by Michelle Cahill is a novel that reimagines Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway" through the perspective of a minor character, Daisy Simmons. The book explores the journeys of two Anglo-Indian women, Daisy and Mina, as they navigate issues of race, identity, and belonging in 1920s London and present-day England. The novel has received mostly positive reviews for its exploration of race and its challenge to the whiteness of the Western canon. However, one reviewer failed to recognize the novel's examination of race, highlighting the ongoing invisibility and reproduction of white power. Despite its criticisms of Woolf's representation of Daisy, the novel also pays homage to Woolf's feminist and experimental aesthetics. Overall, "Daisy and Woolf" is a significant contribution to the literary canon, particularly in terms of Australian literature, women's literature, and literature by people of color. [Extracted from the article]

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 examines the representation of clouds in Adalbert Stifter's (1805–68) literary writing. His ubiquitous representations of clouds signify the poetic challenges to represent empirical reality of natural phenomena (such as weather phenomena) within the literary medium. The article connects his representation of clouds with scholarly discourses of meteorology during the nineteenth century and offers as context observations by the meteorologist Andreas von Baumgartner (1793–1865). Baumgartner worked as a Professor of Natural Sciences at the University of Vienna and was a friend of Stifter's. Taking Baumgartner's epistemological ambiguities about the weather as a point of departure, the article demonstrates how Stifter's novellaKalkstein(1853) not only displays similar insecurities, but also how the text makes use of them to reflect the possibilities of poetic representation within the mode of literary realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persian fiction has undergone changes during recent decades in a way that at times some paradoxical and exaggerating comments have been put forth regarding some writers and consequently readers have been left perplexed. One of these authors is Sadegh Choubak about whose writing style much has been said and written. Naturalism, realism, symbolism, Freudianism, existentialism, etc., are the features and isms that have been attributed to this great contemporary novelist of Iran. In between, Choubak's being naturalistic has been proposed am among some critics. This article attempts to answer some problems regarding Choubak's being naturalistic in some literary circles through a comparative study of Choubak's writing style and Emil Zola the principle representative of the naturalism school. In this regard, it studies the features of the works of these two authors and compares them with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]