Abstract
This chapter is the first of two on the 19th-century realist novel and the writers featured are Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Charlotte and Emily Bronte and Charles Dickens. After the term ‘realism’ is discussed, the three American authors are shown, in their variously subversive stories and novels (including The Scarlet Letter and ‘Bartleby’), to contribute to an early questioning of the very notion of realism. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, as opposed to Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, can be read in the same way. Dickens’s Bleak House, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend are discussed from a variety of angles. Critics excerpted include Nancy Armstrong, John Bayley, Nina Baym, Catherine Belsey, Peter Brooks, Stevie Davies, Terry Eagleton, Judith Fetterley, Gabriel Josipovici, Harry Levin, Steven Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, Tony Tanner, Derek Traversi and Virginia Woolf.
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