Reading For Realism

Reading for Realism presents a new approach to U.S. literary history that is based on the analysis of dominant reading practices rather than on the production of texts. Nancy Glazener's focus is the realist novel, the most influential literary form of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--a form she contends was only made possible by changes in the expectations of readers about pleasure and literary value. By tracing readers' collaboration in the production of literary forms, Reading for Realism turns nineteenth-century controversies about the realist, romance, and sentimental novels into episodes in the history of readership. It also shows how works of fiction by Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others participated in the debates about literary classification and reading that, in turn, created and shaped their audiences. Combining reception theory with a materialist analysis of the social formations in which realist reading practices circulated, Glazener's study reveals the elitist underpinnings of literary realism. At the book's center is the Atlantic group of magazines, whose influence was part of the cultural machinery of the Northeastern urban bourgeoisie and crucial to the development of literary realism in America. Glazener shows how the promotion of realism by this group of publications also meant a consolidation of privilege--primarily in terms of class, gender, race, and region--for the audience it served. Thus American realism, so often portrayed as a quintessentially populist form, actually served to enforce existing structures of class and power.

Presents approaches to the question of the relation between capitalism and narrative form, partly by questioning how the "realism" of austerity, privatization, and wealth protection relate to the realism of narrative and cultural production.

This book poses the question: what happens when reading enters the realist process? and answers it by way of a critical study of Stendhal's writing. Ann Jefferson argues that a recognition of the role of reading in representation is particularly crucial to an understanding of Stendhal's realism, and her account includes substantial discussions of De l'Amour, Le Rouge et le Noir, the Vie de Henry Brulard and La Chartreuse de Parme. Her study also draws a number of illuminating parallels between Stendhal and aspects of modern critical theory, and uses them in order to reveal the high degree of sophistication and self-consciousness in Stendhal's writing, qualities which are attributed here to the intensity of his preoccupation with his readers. By focusing on the issue of reading in Stendhal this book not only proposes a reassessment of Stendhal's own work, but also opens up lines of enquiry on the critical problem that is realism.

A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt. Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.

But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind of the scheme and moves to muscle in on this bettors' dream of a long-odds situation. Worked out with all the meticulous detail, terror, and suspense of a nightmare, the tale is, on one level, comparable to a Graham Greene thriller; on another, it explores a group of people, their relationships fears, and loves. For as Leslie A. Fiedler says in his introduction, "John Hawkes.. . makes terror rather than love the center of his work, knowing all the while, of course, that there can be no terror without the hope for love and love's defeat . . . ."

"Realism is one of the most common terms in the critical vocabulary, yet has been described as a 'monster with many heads desperately in need of disentangling'. Professor Furst's collection is ideally placed to help the student understand its complexities and the range of responses it has evoked. She begins with the reflections of such classic 'realist' writers as Balzac and Henry James which provide a context for a series of major twentieth-century readings. After this overture the curtain is raised with contributions from humanist, Marxist, structuralist, rhetorical, reader-oriented, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist and feminist criticism, including excerpts from an international range of critics such as George Lukacs, Roland Barthes, David Lodge and J. Hillis Miller. A substantial Introduction, Headnotes and a Glossary of Terms provide a wider context for the essays and explain terms that may be unfamiliar to the student. A selective annotated Bibliography provides a guide to further reading"--Back cover.

Critical realism is a movement in philosophy and the human sciences most closely associated with the work of Roy Bhaskar. Since the publication of Bhaskars A Realist Theory of Science, critical realism has had a profound influence on a wide range of subjects. This reader makes accessible, in one volume, key readings to stimulate debate about and within critical realism. It explores the following themes: * transcendental realist * the theory of explanatory critique * dialectics * Bhaskar's critical naturalist philosophy of science.