Realism

A examination of time-tested methods used by artists since the Renaissance to make realistic pictures of imagined things.

First published in 1970, this book provides an introduction to literary realism. After considering what realism is and its philosophical roots, it goes on to examine the emergence of the idea of realism in nineteenth-century France and its gradual spread across the wider republic of letters. This work will be of interest to those studying nineteenth-century European literature.

An analysis of the ways in which capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system.

Disrupted Realism is the first book to survey the works of contemporary painters who are challenging and reshaping the tradition of Realism. Helping art lovers, collectors, and artists approach and understand this compelling new phenomenon, it includes the works of 38 artists whose paintings respond to the subjectivity and disruptions of modern experience. Widely published author and blogger John Seed, who believes that we are "the most distracted society in the history of the world," has selected artists he sees as visionaries in this developing movement. The artists' impulses toward disruption are as individual as the artists themselves, but all share the need to include perception and emotion in their artistic process. Six sections lay out and analyze common themes: "Toward Abstraction," "Disrupted Bodies," "Emotions and Identities," "Myths and Visions," "Patterns, Planes, and Formations," and "Between Painting and Photography." Interviews with each artist offer additional insight into some of the most incisive and relevant painting being created today.

Moving west--from Singapore to America, from New York to California--a woman examines the myth of "finding home" even as she comes to terms with its impossibilities.ibilities.

The Antinomies of Realism is a history ofthe nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives – what today’s book reviewers dub “serious novels,” which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past. Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism’s emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history. In contemporary writing, other forms of representation – for which the term “postmodern” is too glib – have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell’s novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices. In a coda, Jameson explains how “realistic” narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.

America today faces a world more complicated than ever before, but our politicians have failed to envision a foreign policy that addresses our greatest threats. Ethical Realism shows how the United States can successfully combine genuine morality with tough and practical common sense. By outlining core principles and a set of concrete proposals for tackling the terrorist threat and contend with Iran, Russia, the Middle East, and China, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman show us how to strengthen our security, pursue our national interests, and restore American leadership in the world.