To be specified published in:
Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives. Volume I: Mapping realismEdited by Dirk Göttsche, Rosa Mucignat and Robert Weninger
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXII] 2021
► pp. 103–190
Routes into realism
Multiple beginnings, shared catalysts, transformative dynamics
This chapter reassesses and remaps the emergence of realist
poetics and style in English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish
literature in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, i.e., mostly
before the French and German theories and critical debates about realism of the
1850s. Focusing largely on the novel and the novella, but also considering short
prose and poetry, the chapter analyzes the often neglected role of Enlightenment
legacies in the rise of realism (sentimentalism, the family novel, the romance),
questions conventional periodization by exploring the development of realist themes
and techniques in the context of romanticism and the historical novel (including the
historical novel of the present), and pioneers the analysis of different forms of
short prose as catalysts of realist representation and style. Two further sections
are devoted to the profile of early realism (proto-realism) in criticism and
literary practice, whose disruptions and experiments are often at odds with later
realist theory, and to the language and style of realist narrative. The chapter’s
comparative approach highlights the common ground between the multiple beginnings of
realism in the different languages and the role of cross-cultural literary
resonances, translations, analogies and dialogues but also the asynchronicity and
specificity of national variations.
Keywords: realism, proto-realism, sentimentalism, romanticism, historical novel, family novel, short prose, poetics, style
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.From the late eighteenth century to realism: Sentimentalism and its legacies in realist poetics
- 2.1From ‘sentimental’ to ‘sympathetic’ realism in British literature
- 2.2Sincerity as a route into psychological realism in French literature
- 2.3The family novel and Enlightenment legacies in German realism
- 2.4Manzoni and the legacy of the romance in Italian literature
- 3.Genre innovation as a route into realism
- 3.1Through romanticism to realism: The rise of the historical novel as a catalyst of realist
narrative
- 3.1.1Walter Scott’s reinvention of the historical novel
- 3.1.2Significant timeframes: The Early Modern period and the rise of realism in the French historical novel (1826–1848)
- 3.1.3From romance to Italian historical realism: Manzoni’s “I promessi sposi”
- 3.1.4Galdós and the Spanish “novela de costumbres”
- 3.2The nineteenth-century Zeitroman as the historical novel of the present
- 3.3Short forms as catalysts of realist representation
- 3.3.1The English, French and German prose-sketch
- 3.3.2“Cuadros de costumbres” and the Spanish realist novella and novel
- 3.3.3The emergence of realism in Russian literature
- 3.3.4English parafiction and loco-descriptive poetry
- 3.3.5The Italian novella
- 3.1Through romanticism to realism: The rise of the historical novel as a catalyst of realist
narrative
- 4.Proto-realisms: Early realist poetics and literary practice
- 4.1English proto-realism and the disruption of consensual poetics
- 4.2The dialectics of idealism and realism in early German realism
- 4.3Contemporaneity and mimetic illusion in early French realism
- 5.The language of realism: The emergence of realist styles and techniques
- 5.1Free Indirect Discourse in English and French realism
- 5.2Stylistic profiles of early realism in Italian, German, Russian and Spanish
- 6.Conclusions, perspectives, challenges
-
Acknowledgements -
Notes -
Works cited
Published online: 21 April 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxii.05got
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxii.05got
References
Works cited
Achinger, Christine
Agethen, Matthias
Althaus, Thomas
Althaus, Thomas, Wolfgang Bunzel, and Dirk Göttsche
Amiel, Joseph H.
Annenkov, Pavel Vasil’evich
Anon
Ariès, Philippe and Georges Duby
Arndt, Susan, and Silke Brodersen
Auerbach, Erich
Balzac, Honoré de
1968 “Author’s
Introduction.” In The
Human Comedy, produced
by John Bickers, Dagny and David Widger, n.pag.
Project Gutenberg Online. Accessed April 27, 2019. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1968/1968-h/1968-h.htm
Banfield, Ann
Barnaby, Paul
Baßler, Moritz
Baßler, Moritz, Christoph Brecht, Dirk Niefanger, and Gotthart Wunberg
Begemann, Christian, and Davide Giuriato
Belinsky, V. G.
Benjamin, Walter
Berschmeier, Matthias, Walter Erhart, Kai Kauffmann
Beßlich, Barbara
Blasberg, Cornelia
Bosco, Alessandro
Bowstead, Diana
Broglio, Ron
Brunson, Molly
Bunzel, Wolfgang
Chandler, James
Cohn, Dorrit
Damasio, Antonio R.
Danneberg, Lutz, and Friedrich Vollhardt
Dickens, Charles
1843 A
Christmas
Carol. London: Chapman and Hall. Project Gutenberg Online.
Accessed 30 July
2019. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46/46-h/46-h.htm
Dohm, Katharina, Claire Garnier, Laurent Le Bon, and Florence Ostende
Dostoevsky, Fjodor M.
Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von
Duncan, Ian
Eldrige, Sarah Vandegrift
Ellison, Julie
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds
Favret, Mary
Fergus, Jan
Ferguson, Frances
Ferris, Ina
2008 “Scholarly
Revivals: Gothic Fiction, Secret History, and Hogg’s Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified
Sinner
.” In Recognizing
the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction,
1780–1830, edited by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman, 267–84. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Flitter, Derek
Fontane, Theodor
Gallagher, Catherine
Gioberti, Vincenzo
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
Göttsche, Dirk
2011b “Gutzkow
und Laube: Poetologische Aspekte einer Zeitgenossenschaft zwischen Vormärz und
Realismus.” In Karl
Gutzkow and His Contemporaries / Karl Gutzkow und seine Zeitgenossen: Beiträge
zur Internationalen Konferenz des Editionsprojektes Karl Gutzkow vom 7. bis 9.
September 2010 in Exeter, edited
by Gert Vonhoff with Beke Sinjen and Sabrina Stolfa, 79–106. Bielefeld: Aisthesis.
Göttsche, Dirk, and Nicholas Saul
Greiner, Rae
Gutzkow, Karl Ferdinand
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Huber, Therese
Hugo, Victor
Jost, François
Kauffmann, Kai
Kern, Stephen
Kerr, Heather
Kimmich, Dorothee
Kirkpatrick, Susan
Koselleck, Reinhart
Lauster, Martina
Le Men, Ségolène
Leahey, Thomas Hardy
Levine, George Lewis
Logan, Peter
Luhmann, Niklas
Lukács, Georg
Lynch, Deidre Shauna
Maigron, Louis
Medina, Jeremy T.
Montesinos, José F.
Moretti, Franco
Neumann, Michael, and Kerstin Stüssel
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Nussbaum, Martha
Oettermann, Stephan
Osterhammel, Jürgen
Owenson, Sydney
(Lady
Morgan) 1818 Florence Macarthy:
an Irish
Tale (4 vols). London: Henry Colburn. Archive.org Online.
Accessed July 20,
2019. https://archive.org/details/aflorencemacarthy03morg/page/n8
Pascal, Roy
Pérez Galdós, Benito
Pfau, Thomas
Plumpe, Gerhard
Potkay, Adam
Preiss, Nathalie
Ragone, Giovanni
Rakow, Chistian
Ribbans, Geoffrey
Richardson, Alan
Sammons, Jeffrey
[Schiller, Friedrich
Schofield, Benedict
Scott, Walter
1802 Minstrelsy
of the Scottish
Border (3 vols [1802–1803]) Edinburgh and London: Ballantyne. Archive.org Online.
Accessed July 30,
2019. https://archive.org/details/minstrelsyof01scot
1834 “Essay
on Romance.” In Essays
on Chivalry, Romance, and Drama, vol. 6 of The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir
Walter
Scott, 127–216. Edinburgh: Robert Cadell. Google Books Online.
Accessed July 30,
2019. https://books.google.com/books/about/Essays_on_Chivalry_Romance_and_the_Drama.html?id=zvIMAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false
1889 Lay
of the Last Minstrel [1805], edited
by Margaret Andrews Allen. Boston: Ginn & Co. Archive.org Online.
Accessed July 30,
2019. https://archive.org/stream/layoflastminstre00scotuoft/layoflastminstre00scotuoft_djvu.txt
Sebold, Russell P.
Seward, Anna
Shaftesbury, Third Earl of [Anthony
Ashley
Cooper]
Shattock, Joanne
Sinclair, Alison
1800–1802 Letters
of a Solitary
Wanderer (5 vols). London: Sampson Low. Online. Emory University Libraries. Archive.org Online.
Accessed July 30,
2019. https://archive.org/details/lettersasolitar01smitgoog
Somoff, Victoria
Stanzl, Franz K.
Stevens, Anne H.
Stifter, Adalbert
Thelwall, John
Thérenty, Marie-Eve et al.
Thompson, Judith
Tighe, Mary
Todd, William Mills, III
Tommaseo, Niccolò
Trousson, Raymond
Trumpener, Katie
Vachon, Stéphane
Van Dülmen, Richard
Vermeule, Blakey
Vulpius, Christian August
Wägenbaur, Birgit
Watt, Ian
Weerth, Georg
Wegmann, Nikolaus
Weitzel, [Johann]
Welsh, Alexander
Wessenberg, Heinrich von
Wienbarg, Ludolf
Winter, Hans-Gerhard
Winter, Sarah
Wünsch, Marianne