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context of painting in the nineteenth century; George Levine, The Realistic Imagination. English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (1981); J. P. Stern, On Realism (1973). A difficult book at times, I would nevertheless suggest Katherine Kearns’s Nineteenth-Century Realism. Through the Looking-Glass (1996) for a provocative and thoroughly engaged treatment of Realism. René Wellek’s ‘The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship’, Neophilologus 44 (1960), reprinted in Concepts of Criticism , ed. Stephen J. Nichols Jr (1963) remains a valuable
, Literature, and Culture (1993) and The Realistic Imagination. English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (1981). Kearns’s book (below) quite often has Levine in the background. Raymond Tallis’s In Defence of Realism (1988) directly confronts postmodernists and poststructuralists. It is rather thin on the Realists themselves, preferring instead to demolish all the claims of contemporary critical theory, and it makes no attempt to offer a theory of realism of its own, often falling back on common-sense claims about the nature of language, life and reality
to an external target – empirical phenomena of any predetermined sort – then that conformation needn't be enforced. Given this subservient role in games, digital simulations are more likely to conform to psychophysics than to physics, and therein appear less often as objects of mistrust and fear. Prior to their successful incorporation into game form, for instance, digital-based simulations of humans were often conceived as well-intentioned but, Frankenstein-style, berserk – e.g. Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM, 1968), and Joshua in Wargames (UA, 1983
stories and folktales that engage this trope of the toy as self. These may be couched in a conflict between a toy-like object and the real world (e.g. Frankenstein , Harvey ) or as a transcendent journey from the toy world to the real world (e.g. The Velveteen Rabbit , Pinocchio ). Regardless, this trope involves an opposition between an outside other and an inner, player-determined self. Of course, toys are decidedly not alive – or, perhaps better put, toys have no life of their own . The “livingness” of the toy is a projection of its player. This makes
the horrors wound up in the term, it was an idea that ruling powers readily seized upon and brought back to the (British) imperial centre. Perhaps, in this latter ‘reincarnation’, the idea is most obviously reimagined in the film of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1932). It was not until 1968, however (despite the cultural possibilities engendered by the twentieth century’s earlier crises), that the zombie appeared on our screens. Ten years after that – in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead – the zombie was named as such. The metaphorical possibilities were great
products. The opponents of GM crops were able to present them as products that were being developed by American multinational companies whose primary motivation was profit. They were able to utilise language that portrayed them as a threat to everything that was ‘natural’, as ‘Frankenstein foods’. Framings are not necessarily evidence-based and may have no relation to the underlying science. It is the image that is conveyed that is important. Consider the example of the ‘rogue badger’, a creature that does not exist, but that came to exert an influence on policy. At
the death of her husband, Aunt May, after recovering from the shock, tells him she loves him as much as ever. The softer side of New York City or at least that of a few of its inhabitants is here dramatised. The major problem for Peter is Octavius/Doctor Octopus, the scientist enslaved by his own invention. This modern, technological Frankenstein has run amok, threatening not only the lives of Aunt May and Mary Jane but also of all the residents of the city. In order to defeat this monster, Spider-Man must use every bit of his strength and ingenuity, in
, dialogue, and so on, does not make the reader work too hard to figure out what is being said, at least on the surface level. And yet, when we come to look at the works themselves, how true is this? It would be more accurate to say that the idea of readability is one of the mainstays of realist writing, both for its readers and for its writers, but that it does not necessarily define the language of realism, since accessible language is clearly available in other genres and modes (think of Frankenstein or Nineteen Eighty-Four , although these texts have things to say
issue (‘Of heartache and head injury: reading minds in Persuasion ’) gives a sense of the characteristic interests of cognitivist critics. The essay reads the character of Anne Elliot in Jane Austen's Persuasion in relation to the cognitive science of the day: the broadly accepted view of the mind in Austen's day was ‘socially constructivist’, which is to say that it saw the mind as formed by ‘circumstances and events’. A classic literary example illustrating this consensus would be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , where the monster's character is formed by the
and cosmic forces (fate, destiny, the deity, etc.), and for ‘Promethean’ narratives in which human beings test the limits of their scope and powers – such as Milton's Paradise Lost , Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick . The wilderness is entered as if instinctively by those who would ‘find’ themselves – Moses ascends the mountain to receive the commandments, Christ goes into the wilderness to pray, the aboriginal initiate goes ‘walkabout’ in the outback, Huck Finn ‘lights out for the territories’, and so on. These spaces, then, seem to