From Realism To Symbolism

First published in 1984. Signs for the Times explores imaginative and creative relationships between three major areas of mid-Victorian arts: literature, painting and architecture. Through the detailed critical analysis of particular novels, prose writings, paintings and buildings, Chris Brooks establishes a fusion of realistic and symbolic values that he sees as central to the Victorian creative imagination. He argues that the creative achievement of the mid-nineteenth century needs to be seen far more as a whole than it has previously, and that fundamental imaginative terms are common to art and architecture, to major theoretical writers such as Carlyle, Ruskin and Rugin as well as to the central literary figure of Dickens. All those interested in literature, art, or architecture will welcome this interpretation of symbolic realism within the mid-Victorian world.

Edited by Anna Balakian, this volume marks the first attempt to discuss Symbolism in a full range of the literatures written in the European languages. The scope of these analyses, which explore Latin America, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as well as West European literatures, continues to make the volume a valuable reference today. As René Wellek suggests in his historiographic contribution, the fifty-one contributors not only make us think afresh about individual authors who are “giants,” but also draw us to reassess schools and movements in their local as well as international contexts. Reviewers comment that this “copious and intelligently structured” anthology, divided into eight parts, traces the conceptual bases and emergence of an international Symbolist movement, showing the spread of Symbolism to other national literatures from French sources, as well as the symbiotic transformations of Symbolism through appropriation and amalgamation with local literary trends. Several chapters deal with the relationships between literature and the other arts, pointing to Symbolism at work in painting, music, and theatre. Other chapters on the psychological aspects of the Symbolist method connect in interesting ways to a vision of metaphor and myth as virtually musical notation and an experimental emphasis on the play afforded by gaps between words. The volume is “a major contribution” to “the most significant exponents” and “essential themes” of Symbolism. The theoretical, historical, and typological sections of the volume help explain why the impact of this important movement of the fin-de-siècle is still felt today.

In this intellectual and literary history of American, British, and Continental novels of realism and naturalism from 1850 to 1950, Richard Lehan argues that literary naturalism is a narrative mode that creates its own reality. Employing this strategy allows and encourages intertextuality - one novel talking or responding to another.