Core essay. Dynamics of realist forms

Abstract

Nineteenth-century realism is often associated with a mimetic representation of socio-historical reality in the narrative form of the novel. However, a closer look at the wealth of new genres and literary forms that were created by writers and artists within the various factions of realism offers a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of realist art based on new communicative, creative and social challenges and opportunities. In this chapter, we want to explore and analyze different aspects of the simultaneous preoccupation of writers with the new social reality and its changes, tensions and classes on the one hand, and with an ongoing search for literary forms to express these new experiences of reality and convey them to a diverse readership on the other. Taking our point of departure in the notions of ‘composition’ and ‘self-reflexiveness,’ our aim will be to detail the disruptive innovative force of realist writing across literary and non-literary texts as well as across verbal and visual media, both in nineteenth-century realism and into the twentieth and twenty-first century. Over the past one hundred and twenty years, activist and interventionist strategies in various avant-garde movements contribute to redefine realism through literary forms that point both to readers’ literary and social commitment, and this kind of dialogic exchange – an exchange that underpins all contemporary realist practice – becomes a means to transform social reality itself.