The Persistence Of Realism In Modernist Fiction

Demonstrates the persistence of realism's characteristic concerns - sympathy, melodrama, gender and class - in the most aesthetically innovative works of modernist fiction.

A History of the Modernist Novel reassesses the modernist canon and produces a wealth of new comparative analyses that radically revise the novel's history. It also considers the novel's global reach while suggesting that the epoch of modernism is not yet finished.

"Like other poststructuralist theories, Lacanian theory has long been accused of being ahistorical. In The Subject of Modernism, Tony E. Jackson combines a uniquely graspable explanation of the Lacanian theory of the self with a series of detailed psychoanalytic interpretations of actual texts to offer a new kind of literary history." "After exposing the seldom-discussed history of the self found in the work of Lacan, Jackson shows that the basic plot structure of realistic novels reveals an unconscious desire to preserve a certain kind of historically institutionalized self, but that the desire of realism to write the most real representation of reality steadily makes the self-preservation more difficult to sustain. Thus in following through on its own desire to prove the certainty of its being, realism eventually discovers its own impossibility. Jackson charts the resistances to and misrecognitions of this discovery as they are revealed in the changes of narrative form from Eliot's last, most ambitious novel, Daniel Deronda, through Conrad's most modernist novels, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves. He ends with an appended consideration of the "Cyclops" and "Nausicaa" chapters from Joyces's Ulysses." "While other critics have argued that realism structures a certain self and modernism undoes that self, they have not attempted a historical explanation of why this change should have occurred. Jackson reads the emergence of modernism as a kind of generic self-analysis of realism, analogous to the self-analysis performed by Freud: when realism discovers the significance of its own desire to write the most real representation of reality, it has, in that moment, become modernism. It has grasped its own nature and so fully becomes itself, for the first time, as modernism." "The Subject of Modernism will appeal most obviously to readers of Victorian and modernist fiction, but it will also draw those interested in the history of the novel and in the idea of literary history in general. Finally, because of the way Jackson brings together fiction, psychoanalysis, and history, anyone interested in the history of aesthetics will find here new ways to examine particular art forms."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Philip Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to "unknowing" by addressing the work of three supreme experimental writers: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner. In their novels, the narrative props that support the drama of coming to know are refused. When space turns uncanny rather than lawful, when time ceases to be linear and progressive, objects and others become unfamiliar. So does the subject seeking to know them. Weinstein argues that modernist texts work, by way of surprise and arrest, to subvert the familiarity and narrative progression intrinsic to realist fiction. Rather than staging the drama of coming to know, they stage the drama of coming to unknow. The signature move of modernism is shock, just as resolution is the trademark of realism.Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner wrought their most compelling experimental effects by undermining an earlier Enlightenment project of knowing. Weinstein draws on major Enlightenment thinkers to identify constituent components of the narrative of "coming to know"—the progressive narrative underwriting two centuries of Western realist fiction. The book proceeds by framing modernist unknowing between prior practices of realist knowing, on the one hand, and, on the other, certain later practices—postmodern and postcolonial—that move beyond knowing altogether. In so doing, Weinstein proposes a metahistory of the Western novel, from Daniel Defoe to Toni Morrison.

Using selections by American, British, French, German, Russian, Scandinavian, Spanish, Portuguese, and South American critics and authors, Professor Becker illustrates how realism arose as a reaction to romanticism, and how the practitioners of realism developed conflicting ideas about the means they should use and the ends toward which they should strive. The selections are concerned mainly with prose, since, according to the author, prose fiction has been the major vehicle of realism. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

How do novels travel through time? How might they endure in a changing world and reach the readers of an unknowable future? Modernist writers were eager to think of their books as reaching audiences they could not yet imagine. In recent years however, scholars of modernism have focused on pinning them down: putting these books in their context and these authors in their place. By looking to the future, scholars fear that looking to the future will make literature disengaged, irresponsible, or apolitical; the worry is that literature cannot escape its own moment without also evading the hard truths of history. Out of Context suggests an alternative to this scholarship, proposing that literature travels through time not by transcending history, but by adapting to historical change. The chapters of this book each pair a modernist author with a later reader. In each case, this future reader is also a novelist--someone who reads with an eye to form and craft, and who puts what they see to new use in their own novels. James Baldwin adapts Henry James's modes of characterization; Ngugi wa Thiong'o repurposes Joseph Conrad's nonchronological narratives; and Ken Kesey builds on William Faulkner's use of multiple perspectives. Reading the modernists through these authors' eyes offers a different perspective on them. Literary forms, in this history, do not have intrinsic political meanings; they have a multitude of political uses. Rather than see modernist literary form, in all its fragmentation and complexity, as a source of disruption and doubt, these later authors use modernist forms to distill doubts into conviction. The experiments of modernist fiction stand revealed as tools not of political critique but of political commitment.

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness examines the development of the modernist novel in relation to changing approaches to philosophy. It argues that the puzzle of vagueness challenged the great thinkers of the early twentieth century and led to dramatic changes in both fiction and philosophy. Building on recent interest in the connections among analytic philosophy, pragmatism, and modern literature, this book posits that literary vagueness should be read as a defining quality of modernist fiction.

Examination of the critical discourse on the literary movement of 'realism.' Concepts of Realismsurveys the central episodes in the development of the discourse surrounding 'realism' from its inception, with substantial reference to developments in the United States. It concentrates on modernismand the avant-garde as hostile to the realist movement, but more positive critics of the concept, such as Erich Auerbach and Joseph Stern, also receive ample treatment.

Analyse van de achtergronden en definities van de diverse realistische stromingen in de wereldliteratuur, met een overzicht van de voornaamste werken sedert ca. 1870

A wide-ranging response to The Rhetoric of Fiction.