What is realism?
Ideas and debates
This chapter outlines – selectively and strategically –
major frameworks in which problems of reflection, truthfulness, verisimilitude, and
realism have been discussed from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Some of
these frameworks (especially since the 1930s) have been purposefully developed as
theories of realism, others have been cultivated, predominantly by writers,
journalists, and critics, in a much richer and more porous discursive environment,
in which the impulses of theory cannot be disentangled from the maelstrom of
actual literary practices. Part One focuses on Georg Lukács, for it is in his work,
and the attendant debates and disagreements, that an entire constellation of
questions around realism is first compellingly formulated. In Part Two we continue
this discussion but shift the focus to earlier discourses on realism, from the
sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, and, crucially, such that would testify to
the ‘impurity’ of theory, to its birth and subsequent existence in the fold of
imbricated, at times even competing, live literary practices. Finally, Part Three
reflects on the relationship between realism and older and contemporaneous
alternatives.
Article outline
- 1.Form and truth: Reconsidering Lukács’s theory of realism in the context of other theories of
realism
- 2.The tasks of realism, or the confluence and divergence of artistic practice and
theory
- 2.1Verisimilitude and genre
- 2.2Who are we? Community and culture
- 2.3How to understand the world in which we live
- 2.4Does literature follow the path of history?
- 2.5How ugly, how immoral is the real?
- 2.6High art and popular literature
- 3.The versatility of realism
- 3.1Realism in touch with its neighbors
- 3.2Surface and depth
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
Works cited
References
Works cited
Balzac, Honoré de
1842 Author’s
Introduction to “The Human Comedy.”
[URL]
Balzac, Honoré de
1893
The Brotherhood of
Consolation [1848], translated by
Katharine Prescott Wormerley.
[URL]
Balzac, Honoré de
1917 Ursula.
The Vicar of Tours, translated
by
Katharine Prescott Wormerley. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.
Balzac, Honoré de
1976a Avant-propos [1842] In
La
Comédie Humaine, edited by
Pierre-Georges Castex, vol. 1 (Bibliothèque
de la
Pléiade). Paris: Gallimard.
Balzac, Honoré de
1976b Le
Colonel
Chabert [1832] In
La
Comédie Humaine, edited by
Pierre-Georges Castex, vol. 3 (Bibliothèque
de la
Pléiade). Paris: Gallimard.
Balzac, Honoré de
1976c Le
Curé de
Tours [1832] In
La
Comédie Humaine, edited by
Pierre-Georges Castex, vol. 4 (Bibliothèque
de la
Pléiade). Paris: Gallimard.
Balzac, Honoré de
1980 Louis
Lambert [1832] In
La
Comédie Humaine, edited by
Pierre-Georges Castex, vol. 11 (Bibliothèque
de la
Pléiade). Paris: Gallimard.
Balzac, Honoré de
1997 Colonel
Chabert, translated by
Carol Cosman. New York: New Directions.
Barthes, Roland
1967 “
Le
Discours de l’histoire.”
Social Sciences
Information 2: 65–75.
Barthes, Roland
1968 “
L’Effet
de
Réel.”
Communications 11: 84–89.
Barthes, Roland
1970 S/Z. Paris: Seuil.
Barthes, Roland
1989 “
The
Reality
Effect” [1968] In
The
Rustle of Language, translated
by
Richard Howard, 141–48. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Béguin, Albert
1946 Balzac
visionnaire,
propositions. Geneva: Skira.
Bourget, Paul
1889 Le Disciple. Paris: Alphonse Lemetre.
Brontë, Anne
1992 The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall, edited
by
Herbert Rosengarten. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Brooks, Peter
2005 Realist
Vision. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cervantes, Miguel de
1992 Don
Quijote, translated
by
Charles Jarvis. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Cervantes, Miguel de
2004 Don
Quixote de la
Mancha [1605] Madrid: Real Academia Española.
Curtius, Ernst Robert
1923 Balzac. Bonn: Cohen.
Döblin, Alfred
1929 Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf. Berlin: Fischer.
Döblin, Alfred
1931 Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf, translated by
Eugene Jolas. London: Secker & Warburg.
Dufour, Philippe
1998 Le
réalisme: De Balzac à
Proust. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Engels, Friedrich
1888 Marx-Engels
Correspondence, 1888.
[URL]
Fielding, Henry
1967
Joseph
Andrews and Shamela
[1741–1742], edited by
Douglas Brooks-Davies and
Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Flaubert, Gustave
1952 Un
Cœur
simple [1877] In
Œuvres, edited
by
Albert Thibaudet and
René Dumesnil, vol. 2 (Bibliothèque
de la
Pléiade). Paris: Gallimard.
Flaubert, Gustave
1961 Three
Tales, translated by
Robert Baldick. New York: Penguin Classics.
Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de
1865 Germinie
Lacerteux, Preface to the First Edition.
[URL]
Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de
1990 Germinie
Lacerteux [1865] Paris: Garnier-Flammarion.
Handke, Peter
1966 Ich
bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
1832 Phänomenologie
des Geistes [1807], edited
by
Johann Schulze. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
1967 The
Phenomenology of Mind, translated
by
J. B. Baillie. New York: Harper and Row.
Heliodorus
[Héliodore]
2008 L’Histoire
Aethiopique [1555], edited
by
Laurence Plazenet, translated
by
Jacques Amyot. Paris: Champion.
Henry, Anne
(ed.) 1988 Schopenhauer
et la creation artistique en
Europe. Paris: Klincksieck.
Herder, Johann Gottfried
1993 “
Shakespear.” In
Schriften
zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767–1781, edited
by
Gunter E. Grimm (=
vol.
2 of Werke, 10 vols, edited
by
Günter Arnold et al.), 498–521. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.
Herder, Johann Gottfried
2008 Shakespeare [1773], translated
and introduced by
Gregory Moore. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von
1908 “
Einleitung.” In Honoré de Balzac,
Die Menschliche
Komödie, vol. 1, viii–xxvi. Leipzig: Insel.
Hugo, Victor
1862 Les
Misérables, Préface.
[URL]
Hugo, Victor
1887 Les
Misérables, Preface [1862], translated
by
Isabel F. Hapgood. New York: Crowell.
[URL]
Hugo, Victor
1999 Cromwell [1827] Paris: Garnier-Flammarion.
Hume, David
2007 An
Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding [1748], edited
by
Peter Millican. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Jacquette, Dale
(ed.) 1996 Schopenhauer,
Philosophy and the Arts. Cambridge University Press.
Jakobson, Roman
1971 “
The
Dominant.” In
Readings
in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist
Views, edited and translated
by
Ladislav Matejka and
Krystyna Pomorska, 82–87. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
James, Henry, and Robert Louis Stevenson
1948 Henry
James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and
Criticism [1884], edited
by
Janet Adam Smith. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.
Jameson, Fredric
2014 The
Antinomies of
Realism. London: Verso.
Jefferson, Ann
1988 Reading
Realism in
Stendhal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lukács, Georg
1964 Werke, edited
by
Frank Benseler, vol. 7. Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand.
Lukács, Georg
1970 “
Narrate
or Describe? A Preliminary Discussion of Naturalism and
Formalism.” In
Writer
and Critic, and Other Essays, edited and translated
by
Arthur Kahn, 110–48. London: Merlin Press.
Lukács, Georg
1971 Werke, edited
by
Frank Benseler, vol. 4. Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand.
Lukács, Georg
1972 Studies
in European
Realism. London: Merlin Press.
Lukács, Georg
1981 Entwicklungsgeschichte
des modernen Dramas. Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand.
Murray, Philippe
1964 Le
XIXe siècle à travers les
âges. Paris: Denoël.
Petrey, Sandy
1988 Realism
and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of
History. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Preiss, Nathalie
2009 Honoré
de
Balzac. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Prendergast, Christopher
1986 The
Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval,
Flaubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ramankutty Menon, Kizhakkeppattu
2004 “
Parangodi
Parinayam
, translated
by
Sulochana Rammohan.”
Samyukta 4.1: 42–89.
Richardson, Samuel
1741 Pamela:
or, Virtue Rewarded, fourth
edition. London: C. Rivington and J. Osborn.
Robbins, Bruce
1993 “
Modernism
and Literary Realism:
Response.” In
Realism
and Representation, edited by
George Levine, 225–31. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press.
Schor, Naomi
2013 Reading
in Detail: Aesthetics and the
Feminine [1987] London: Routledge.
Scott, Walter
1989 Waverley;
or, ’Tis Sixty Years
Since [1814], edited
by
Claire Lamont. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Sénard, Marie-Antoine-Jules
Stendhal
1952 Lucien
Leuwen [1836], “
Deuxième
préface.” In
Romans et
Nouvelles, vol. 1, edited
by
Henri Martineau, 761–62. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
Storm, Theodor
2009 The
Rider on the White Horse and Selected
Stories [1888], translated
by
James Wright. New York: New York Review of Books Classics.
Thackeray, William M.
1983 Vanity
Fair [1847–1848], edited
by
John Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Tihanov, Galin
1998 “
Voloshinov,
Ideology and Language: The Birth of Marxist Sociology from the Spirit of
Lebensphilosophie
.”
South
Atlantic
Quarterly 97.3–4: 599–621.
Tocqueville, Alexis de
1945 Democracy
in America [1840], translated
by
Henry Reeve,
Francis Bowen, and
Phillips Bradley, vol. 2. New York: Vintage.
Watt, Ian
1957 The
Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and
Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Williams, Raymond
1976 Keywords:
A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
1958 Philosophical
Investigations, translated by
G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.
Young, Edward
1918 Conjectures
on Original Composition [1759], edited
by
Edith J. Morley. London: Longmans.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Krueger, Cheryl
2024.
Under Pressure: Flaubert’s Human Barometers.
Dix-Neuf ► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.