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Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives
Edited by Svend Erik Larsen, Steen Bille Jørgensen and Margaret R. Higonnet
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIII] 2022
► pp. 423–447

“Distance avails not”

Representing the modern masses

| Aarhus University
Around 1850 the major cities in Europe approached the one-million mark. With the influx of people of all kinds, a new urban mass emerged that seemed quite distinct from the well-defined social classes of citizens from top to bottom of society. From that point the urban environment, its objects and the composition of its people never stopped changing. All classes, old and new, mingled in the bustling street life, and all classes depended on the same infrastructure for transport and sanitation that determined everybody’s movements and not least their health. In this new context, the distance between the individual and the mass began to shrink, because the very volume of inhabitants created a mutual dependency between them that challenged the understanding of both individual and collective identity. To interpret urban life, arts and literature began to explore new ways of representing the mass and thereby city life in general. In this case study, Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman and Bruno Wille will open the discussion. Works of Eugène Delacroix and Honoré Daumier will show the early attempts to represent the new urban masses in the visual arts, while Charles Dickens’s novels Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) illustrate the realist representation of the masses as an ongoing project in a changing social reality.
Keywords: distance, urban masses, body experience, visual and literary representation, observation, interaction, realism
Article outline
  • 1.The individual and the masses
  • 2.The individual as part of the masses
    • 2.1Visualizing the masses
    • 2.2Narrating the masses
  • 3.Coda: A needle in a haystack
  • Notes
  • Works cited
Published online: 16 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxiii.12lar
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