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This book is a part of a series titled Contemporary British Novelists, which explores the influence of diverse traditions, histories and cultures on prose fiction. Science fiction provided one escape route from the social limitations and stultifying conventions of literary realism. It opened the door to preoccupations typically ignored by the mainstream writers from whom Ballard was alienated, and it enabled him to align himself with a 'popular' genre that mocked the overweening pretensions of so-called 'high' art. This book provides a darker reading of self-deification as the expression of the untrammelled monstrous ego, a reading that looks ahead to Ballard's exploration of nihilism in Millennium People. Ballard has suggested that 'our talent for the perverse, the violent, and the obscene, may be a good thing' and that we 'may have to go through this phase to reach something on the other side, it's a mistake to hold back and refuse to accept one's nature'. This commitment to the logic of the quest can then be read as a form of optimism, and enables Ballard to claim that his is 'a fiction of psychic fulfilment' because it encourages his characters to discover 'the truth about themselves' even if this process of discovery culminates in their deaths Ballard's late novels lay bare the psychopathologies of everyday life in a post-humanist world. His writing traces the sinister trajectories often taken by a potentially world-annihilating technology, it also explores the emancipatory hopes and the uneasy pleasures unleashed by the juggernaut of modernity.
Terms used to describe artistic practices have different meanings from their common usage, but 'realism' as an aesthetic idea cannot be too far removed from the way we would talk about something 'real'. This book explores the artistry and aesthetics of realist literature, along with the assumptions of realist literature. It examines the different ways in which theorists, critics and philosophers conceptualise 'realism'. The book argues that a 'realist' sensibility is the ground on which other modes of literature often exist. It considers verisimilitude that is associated with the complexity of realism, describing the use of realism in two ways: capital 'R' and small 'r'. A set of realist novels is used to explore preliminary definition of realism. The STOP and THINK section lists some points to consider when thinking about realist works. The book looks at the characteristics of the Realist novel. It deals with the objections raised in discussions of Realism, from the Realist period and twentieth- and twenty-first century criticisms. The book provides information on the novel genre, language that characterises Realism, and selection of novel material. It looks at crucial elements such as stage design, and a technical feature often overlooked, the aside, something which seems non-realistic, and which might offer another view on Realism. The book talks about some writers who straddled both periods from the 1880s and 1890s onwards, until the 1920s/1930s, gradually moved away from Realism to modernism. Literary realism, and Aristotle's and Plato's works in relation to realism are also discussed.
In a 1961 interview with the journalist Studs Terkel, James Baldwin offered a riveting assessment of Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues.” “It’s a fantastic kind of understatement,” Baldwin tells Terkel. “It’s the way I want to write.” Baldwin hears something in Bessie, a sonic and discursive quality he aspires to and identifies as “fantastic.” This essay considers the speculative undertones of Bessie’s blues and Baldwin’s literary realism. I argue that Bessie’s doubled vocalization in “Backwater Blues” lyrically declares her immobility and circumscription, while tonally staging freedom and boundlessness. Baldwin is drawn to this dual orientation and enunciation, a vocalization that in its iteration of the real transcends the social, spatial, and imaginative limitations of that order. If we read “Sonny’s Blues” the way Baldwin hears Bessie, as a fantastic kind of understatement, we discern subtle sonic and spatial iterations of the irreal. Attending to microtonal sounds in “Sonny’s Blues”—screams, whistling, jukeboxes—I show that the speculative emerges in Baldwin’s story when the sonic overrides the racialized inscription of space.
theorists, critics and philosophers conceptualise ‘realism’, and it explores the different approaches we might bring to both the theories of realism and the analysis of texts, realist and otherwise. As we observe, when we talk of realism as a philosophical attitude, it is a particular way of seeing and understanding the world, and when we speak of ‘literary realism’, we are identifying a class of literature that adheres to some version of this realist stance, and treats and presents its material accordingly. When we consider realism as a particular literary mode for
Introduction In this chapter I aim to give a sense of some of the most important critical work on literary realism from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The field is complex, contributing no doubt to the belief that realism is a ‘slippery’ term, and there can be no attempt here to be comprehensive. I begin by giving a sketch of the different channels of thought and arguments, and also place them in relation to the discussion on the preceding pages. One aspect that will emerge as significant, and which has not been quite so apparent as yet, is the
; the idea that beauty can be universally observed by those with good taste; the idea of genius as non-copyable inspiration; the idea that what is beautiful is also morally good. All of these ideas contributed to the Romanticism that Realism reacted against. In this light, I will jump back once more into the nineteenth century. Philosophy and Realism If philosophic and aesthetic principles do not wholly coincide with the realist impulse until the nineteenth century, we still might ask exactly how much does literary Realism depend upon philosophical realism, or
, to blow a hair’s-breadth off The dust of the actual. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh , II, 476–83) The previous chapters have focused on the novel from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards as being at the forefront of literary Realism. Indeed, many critics and theorists regard discussion of literary realism as one related solely to the novel genre. However, Realism was such a dominant force in the nineteenth century that poetry and drama were obliged to respond to it. That this was the order of influence is repeatedly borne out by
, determinist tradition had a direct influence on French literary realism during the nineteenth-century. Stendhal drew on the ideas of Helvétius and the ideologues in his Le Rouge et le noir (1830), and employed one of Helvétius’ key terms when describing his novel as a chronique of French society. One of the key ideas which Stendhal and other realists took from the ideologues was the notion that people fell into broad categories
literary realism can be simultaneously stable (an accessible, truthful representation of social conditions at a particular historical moment) yet sufficiently unstable to suggest an evolving discourse (a vision of future possibilities both linguistic and political). This difficulty was certainly not unique to Harkness, but in a period of significant social change it went to the very heart of her task. Social semantics, that is, a common discourse carrying cultural meaning in the process of refinement by dynamic contemporary usage, is the raw material that a novelist
This chapter explores representations of impairment and disability in the ‘Literary Realism’ writings of George Eliot and Harriet Martineau and investigates a different medium of popular perceptions and representations of disability, that of popular fiction. Criticism addressing the use of disabled characters in Victorian fiction frequently acknowledges how such characters function by invoking feelings of sympathy, both within the narrative and in readers. However, Deerbrook’s Maria Young and Philip Wakem in The Mill on the Floss reverse our expectations: rather than being the subjects of observation and sympathy, they operate as model observers of the world around them. In this, they differ from the stereotypical role assigned to disabled characters in other Victorian novels and seek to follow one of the guiding principles of Literary Realism, the accurate portrayal of daily life, rather than some romanticised notion.