Search results
are ultimately suppressed and supplanted by English law. The exciting illogic of domestic melodrama is thus replaced by a ‘realistic’ lesson in the inevitable and virtuous effects of Empire. Alongside the presumed moral and political ‘realism’ of these plays there was another factor that further complicated the relation of genre to setting. Early colonial melodrama had strong
In literary studies George Eliot (1819–80) is often identified as the most ardent proponent of realism. Historical discussions of realism frequently invoke her letters, her novels and her review of two works by German ethnographer W. H. Riehl (1823–97). Today we read ‘The Natural History of German Life’ as a kind of manifesto for realist fiction. Eliot famously states that ‘the greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies’, but she problematises those sympathies when they are
. Among them, the approach to the Laocoon developed in Charles Bell’s Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (1806) was central to the emergence of an organised new model of anatomical realism. In the vagaries of bodily pain and the plenitude of material details it revealed, Bell found a painful mode of spectatorship as well as a realist, new genre of anatomical criticism in full accord with Burke’s earlier guidelines. Bell’s sketches from Waterloo (1815) took this process even further, to an unprecedented imagery of extreme war surgery, ravaging injury, and
for the social order and ‘Christian thinkers’ to ‘blend theological thought with sociological knowledge’. 51 Oldham agreed but complained to Temple that, unfortunately, ‘some of the theologians’ were the ‘most stupid’ about faith and society: their rarefied ‘theological atmosphere’ was remote from ‘the actual world’. 52 Nonetheless, five theological influences on the group stand out: (1) domestic traditions of ‘liberalism’; (2) the ‘Christian realism’ of Reinhold Niebuhr; (3) the neo-Thomist philosophy of Jacques Maritain; (4) ‘continental’ Protestant theology
apart from the trade in ideas, books and goods. In what follows I show how, in particular West Indian contexts, the kinds of violent improbabilities that help to form the particular texture of Edgeworth’s realism often concern seeds and plants. Within the specific scenes that flow from Edgeworth’s thinking about slavery in the context of improving debates about education and
films also contributed to their belittlement of a nuclear bomb’s destructive power. Although Survival Under Atomic Attack and other films included shots of the real devastation that had been brought about by the A-bomb attacks on Japan, in many other cases the realism of the films’ photographic images was undermined by the fact that these images only showed staged damages, injuries and deaths. Furthermore, numerous civil defence films represented the dangers of nuclear explosions in drawings, which, although often animated, were even more removed from reality. Finally
frequency. The European ambitions of some of the Italian delegates were a relic of early liberal nationalism but were out of touch with the realism that began to dictate international relations after 1860. Italy’s vision of Europe was very different from that of other countries. In its enthusiasm, Italy had reverted to an obsolete ideology, as if it could shore up its own legitimacy by making a bold appeal for a European future. Most of Europe’s governments had long considered that notion passé. Notes 1 U. Pesci, Firenze Capitale (1865–1870) (Florence 1904), p. 387
the hard realism that lay at the heart of absolute government. This is not to deny that in other areas, notably in their spheres of judicial and administrative competence, the royal administration treated the parlements favourably, even leniently. But this was because the king already occupied the political high ground, controlling the strategic terrain. Strong where it counted most, he could afford to relax pressure in areas where issues of supreme authority did not come into play. 195 Louis XIV and the parlements If this sterner view of Louis XIV’s absolutism
with favourable outcomes that were already common knowledge. These pictures of battle could be said to exist in a grey area, somewhere between reality and spectacle. One of the motivations for these manipulations, which were less concealed than one might expect, was a nostalgia for engraving and painting. The photomontage image, in particular, was a hybrid that joined the narrative capacity of nineteenth-century war correspondents’ sketches to the realism of photography. The image thus combined the