Landscapes of Realism

Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives

Volume I: Mapping realism

Editors

Dirk Göttsche | University of Nottingham

Rosa Mucignat | King's College London

Robert Weninger | King's College London

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027208064 | EUR 190.00 | USD 285.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027260369 | EUR 190.00 | USD 285.00

Few literary phenomena are as elusive and yet as persistent as realism. While it responds to the perennial impulse to use literature to reflect on experience, it also designates a specific set of literary and artistic practices that emerged in response to Western modernity. Landscapes of Realism is a two-volume collaborative interdisciplinary exploration of this vast territory, bringing together leading-edge new criticism on the realist paradigms that were first articulated in nineteenth-century Europe but have since gone on globally to transform the literary landscape. Tracing the manifold ways in which these paradigms are developed, discussed and contested across time, space, cultures and media, this first volume tackles in its five core essays and twenty-five case studies such questions as why realism emerged when it did, why and how it developed such a transformative dynamic across languages, to what extent realist poetics remain central to art and popular culture after 1900, and how generally to reassess realism from a twenty-first-century comparative perspective.

The two volumes of Landscapes of Realism have won the 2024 Excellence Award for Collaborative Research, awarded by the European Society of Comparative Literature.

This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount: https://www.benjamins.com/series/chlel/chlel_special_offer_realism.pdf

[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, XXXII] 2021. xvii, 814 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 25 March 2021

https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxii

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Editors’ preface and acknowledgments | pp. xv–xvi

Note on translations, cross-references and documentation | pp. xvii–17

Introduction

Dirk Göttsche, Rosa Mucignat and Robert Weninger | pp. 1–28

What is realism? Ideas and debates

Thomas Pavel and Galin Tihanov | pp. 31–64

Case studies

The contest of realism: German Marxist “realism debates” from the 1930s to the 1950s

Robert Weninger | pp. 65–79

How real is realism? Gérard de Nerval’s “bizarre arrangements of life”

Régine Borderie | pp. 81–88

The emergence of the novel in India and competing modes of realism

Sascha Ebeling | pp. 89–99

Routes into realism: Multiple beginnings, shared catalysts, transformative dynamics

Dirk Göttsche, Ann Caesar, Anne Duprat, Rae Greiner, Anne Lounsbery and Stephen Roberts | pp. 103–190

Case studies

Routes into realism: Painting, from the eighteenth century into the early nineteenth

Brendan Prendeville | pp. 191–212

Routes into American realism

Graham Thompson | pp. 213–230

Realism and translation: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for an Austro-Hungarian minority and beyond

Tatjana Jukić | pp. 231–244

Fleeting moments and unstable spaces: Explorations of time and space in realism

Svend Erik Larsen and Rosa Mucignat | pp. 247–320

Case studies

Cartographic realism in nineteenth-century literature

Anders Engberg-Pedersen | pp. 321–335

Mobile spaces: The impact of traveling in realism

Svend Erik Larsen | pp. 337–356

Reclaiming space, mastering time in African postcolonial fiction

Itala Vivan | pp. 357–372

Utopian island realism in J. M. Synge’s travel narrative of The Aran Islands and Tomás O’Crohan’s autobiography The Islander

Niall Sreenan | pp. 373–386

In-between spaces in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore : Time and space in Japanese realism

Midori Tanaka Atkins | pp. 387–401

Haptic realism: Erik Poppe’s film U-July 22 and the aesthetics of duration

Asbjørn Grønstad | pp. 403–413

Literary playing fields in motion: Remapping and rereading nineteenth-century realism

Dirk Göttsche | pp. 417–487

Case studies

The French debate about Gustave Courbet’s pictorial realism and the dialogue between literature and art in the mid-nineteenth century

Julien Zanetta | pp. 489–501

Russian families, accidental and other

Anne Lounsbery | pp. 503–514

The benefit of reading marginal forms: Dramatic monologue and ekphrastic poetry

Rae Greiner | pp. 515–529

Madame Bovary in Italy: Forms of realism in the late nineteenth-century Italian novel

Olivia Santovetti | pp. 531–549

Eça and Machado: Money and adultery in Lusophone realism

Simão Valente | pp. 551–564

Zola, realism and naturalism in late nineteenth-century Greece

Sotirios Paraschas | pp. 565–576

The polyphony of late nineteenth-century Baltic realism

Benedikts Kalnačs | pp. 577–595

Straw man or profligate son? Transformations of literary realism since 1900

Robert Weninger | pp. 599–696

Case studies

Realism across borders: The role of state institutions in making Italian neo-realist film transnational

Francesco Di Chiara and Paolo Noto | pp. 697–714

Realism in play: The uses of realism in computer game discourse

Paul Martin | pp. 715–734

Realism and postcolonial subjectivity in the Black British Bildungsroman

Birgit Neumann | pp. 735–749

The rise and fall of socialist realism: The case of Christa Wolf

Robert Weninger | pp. 751–760

Realism in Anglo-American crime fiction

Simão Valente | pp. 761–774

Biographical fiction’s challenge to realism: Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl and Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Una habitación ajena

Lucia Boldrini | pp. 775–792

Notes on contributors | pp. 793–799

Index

“Every student and scholar of realism will find much to discover and to learn from in Mapping Realism. Throughout the volume, the contributors situate their discussions in relation to the foundational critics of realism: Auerbach, Jameson, Lukács, Moretti, Watt and others. Many of the essays also discuss the novelists one would expect to find in such a work on realism: Balzac, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Hardy, Scott, Stendhal, and Zola. The volume as a whole strikes a nice balance in relation to this extensive tradition that will make its insights widely accessible. The essays do not presuppose a deep familiarity with the debates and developments within the critical tradition of realism, but readers more well versed in this scholarship will be able to tease out the broader ramifications of the work being done within these pages. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Mapping Realism is the interplay between its core essays, which consolidate the foundational ideas and issues, and case studies that chart new directions in the field. While the index only lists proper names (rather than keywords and concepts), the core essays are divided into sections and sub- sections whose descriptive titles provide legible points of entry for readers. Just as importantly, essays reference and direct readers to relevant points of association both within this volume and its companion. The sheer range of topics and ideas in this work will make it a touchstone for scholarship on realism in European languages and beyond.”

Adam Grener, Victoria University of Wellington, in Recherche litteraire/Literay Research 38 (Fall 2022).

Subjects