Landscapes of Realism

Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives

Volume I: Mapping realism

Editors
ORCID logoDirk Göttsche | University of Nottingham
ORCID logoRosa Mucignat | King's College London
Robert Weninger | King's College London
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027208064 | EUR 190.00 | USD 285.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027260369 | EUR 190.00 | USD 285.00
 
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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.

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

Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
“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.”
Subjects

Main BIC Subject

DSB: Literary studies: general

Main BISAC Subject

LIT006000: LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2020043005 | Marc record