European Realism Research Articles

Linear perspective: a visual revolution.

Molecular biology revolutionized the way we look at other sciences related to medicine, including biochemistry. Currently, genetic testing is fast becoming a routine laboratory tool, and it is the foundation for developing personalized treatments. Revolutions, or paradigm changes, both in art and science have always been a combined result of the work of exceptional individuals, interdisciplinary interactions, and the dynamics of funding and patronage. It is interesting to recall an all-encompassing revolution in the arts, which happened around 600 years ago, at the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. Florence, one of the Italian city-states, was then a cultural microcosm with an extraordinary concentration of both artists and wealth—and also strong civic pride, which was to an important extent expressed through arts and architecture (1). It was there that the application of mathematics to painting dramatically changed the way painters represented space. At the beginning of the 15th century, 2 painting styles were predominant in Italy: one being the traditional Byzantine painting emanating from Constantinople, the other an interesting mix of the Byzantine style and northern European realism, resulting in a highly decorative International Gothic. The …

Writing Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic?

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation. (first paragraph)

First as Farce, Then as Tragedy: Cranford and the Internal Periphery of Capitalism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes An alternative way of understanding the relationship between late-nineteenth-century Brazilian literature and the minor literature of mid-nineteenth-century Britain is to frame both out in the sympathetic framework of Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minor literature, in their estimation, is precisely that which arises in the midst of History in a peripheral position—either because it is written in an uncommon language, or in that it borrows, adapts or destabilizes the literary traditions of the national space it operates within. Either way, minor literature deterritorializes hegemonic modes of form and representation in a way that subverts them, and elaborates an alternative genealogy of genre. While it operates in the dominant language and expresses a familiar reality to its contemporary readers, it nevertheless does so with an irony that subverts these representations. It is an insurgent text located within the canon that critiques the very genre that defines canonicity in its era (bourgeois European realism). The complex form, as many critics have noted, of Cranford is crucial to a reading of its significance. The form of the novel is complicated—it began its life as an offhand sketch, “The Last Generation in England,” which relates many of the discrete comic moments that later appear in the Cranford sequence. Thus, the novel has problems with keeping itself to itself, of generating and maintaining a coherence that could transcend the periodical, serial nature of its initial publication and leverage it into the generic form of the novel. As Margaret Croskery notes, “Twentieth-century criticism finds itself in a … compromised position” vis-à-vis its eclectic composition in its attempt to defend Cranford by “seeking to emphasize the novel's narrative strength and to defend it from charges of ‘plotlessness’ or, even worse, lack of unity” (200). See Slavoj Žižek's remarks on the 2008 financial collapse in his recent work, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, in which he adapts his conclusions from The Parallax View to celebrate the literal collapse of fictive capital. Julie Fromer remarks in her book A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England that tea was so pervasive and internalized in Victorian society that few, if any, commented on its true foreignness (1). Tea, associated as it is with a woman's domestic labor, has the force of dense cultural, historical, and materialist significance: it “both elides and affirms boundaries between labor and leisure, working class and middle class, England and empire, colony and postcolony,” she suggestively argues (301). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJames ArnettJames Arnett received his PhD in English at the City University of New York (CUNY) GGraduate Center. His dissertation was entitled “Eliot's Spinoza: Realism, Affect, and Ethics.”

Power and Resistance: The Reality of Spanish Realism

The scant attention given to Spain in studies on European realism cannot be attributed to issues of literary quality, because Spanish realism has been widely acknowledged to possess works and authors of extraordinary importance. Rather, it ought to be ascribed to the country's marginal position in Europe in the last two centuries and to the failure of criticism to underscore the movement's uniqueness. An analysis of Spanish realism, as it was defined in contemporary debates and in the writings of some of its most representative authors, shows the movement's determination to distance itself from its French counterpart, as well as its desire to connect with the Golden Age tradition of Miguel de Cervantes and the picaresque novel. This dual impulse shapes its distinctiveness not only thematically, but at the structural and stylistic levels as well. Spanish realism exhibits a unique idiosyncrasy that must be taken into account to understand the protean nature of a richer and far more complex movement than is generally acknowledged.

Colonial Mimicry and Postcolonial Re-membering in Isidore Okpewho's <em>Call Me by My Rightful Name</em>

In Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004), Isidore Okpewho harnesses the distinctive virtues of the African imagination and worldview to both complement and interrogate Western paradigms of knowledge. Where in his earlier novels The Victims (1970), Last Duty (1976) and Tides (1993) Okpewho conformed to the tradition of European realism, Call Me by My Rightful Name appropriates the techniques of magical realism that the novelist locates in African folk imagination. However, with both the techniques of orality and embodied textuality to excavate common bonds of black experience, Okpewho treads the challenging path between transvaluation and reification of colonial myths about Africa.

An “Internationalism of the Planted Earth”:

Research Article| March 01 2011 An “Internationalism of the Planted Earth”:The Literary Origins of Bessie Head's Idea of the Village Eleni Coundouriotis Eleni Coundouriotis University of Connecticut Eleni Coundouriotis is an associate professor of English and the associate director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. She is currently completing a book on the war novel in Africa entitled The People's Right to the Novel. Her earlier work includes Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel (1999) and numerous articles on African fiction, European realism, and human rights. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2011) 48 (1): 20–43. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.1.0020 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Eleni Coundouriotis; An “Internationalism of the Planted Earth”:The Literary Origins of Bessie Head's Idea of the Village. Comparative Literature Studies 1 March 2011; 48 (1): 20–43. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.1.0020 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressComparative Literature Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2011The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Global Lukács

Lukácsian narrative theory remains influential in literary studies despite the fact that many of its principles and conclusions seem specific to novel production within the industrializing heartland of the nineteenth-century European nation-state. Starting with the premise that two of Lukács's interconnected blind spots were modernist form and imperial history, this essay looks to some of the central concepts of The Theory of the Novel, The Historical Novel, and Studies in European Realism for a broader, twentieth-century, and global frame of reference. To that end, it builds on two critical essays, “Traveling Theory” and “Travelling Theory Reconsidered,” in which Edward Said takes the concept of reification as an apt way to describe a specific symbolic procedure central to colonial discourse: the dehumanization of the native. If we follow out the Fanonian logic of that claim, we can think of late European humanism (and its associated modernist discourses of psyche and myth) as crucially formed by the colonial world system. In that case we can also reread modernism in a properly global frame, turning Lukács against Lukács, by taking the modernist novel of consciousness not as a testament to bourgeois inwardness and decadence but as an artifact whose form was partially determined by objective social and historical conditions in the colonial and metropolitan contact zones of the Age of Empire.

In Search of a Phallus: Jacinto's True Quest in "A Cidade e As Serras"

InSearchofa Phallus:Jacinto's TrueQuestinA Cidadee AsSerras PHILLIP ROTHWELL A Cidade e As Serrasis a storyof skeletons and closetcases. Indeed,a suppressedhomoeroticframework structures the whole novel; Eça's narrator reveals, through possessive epithets andpulchritudinous appellations ,the object of his desire,a 'belo Jacinto'who is repeatedly the 'príncipe' ofthebesotted JoséFernandes.1 Ofcourse, thelovethey shareis one whichdarenotspeakitsnameand,on theoccasionwhenitdoesreducedto a coarsesexualact- itis pathologized as a symptom ofthe decadent processofurbanization (p. 69).JoséFernandes relates thetaleof Jacinto's salvation from theillsofthecity, from pollution andartificiality, from immorality, and from himself. Anheirless dandywithno interest in women,Jacinto willreturn to hisancestral hometo re-bury thebonesof his forebears and, in the process,appears to be converted, or rather naturalized, toheterosexuality. Just howfarhistransformation iscomplete is a mootpoint,fortheboneshe buriesareconfused, and hisnarrator's possessive gazeisnever fully relinquished, as willbediscussed. Alexander Colemanpositsthedegreeto whichJacinto changes, inany quality, as thecentral questionofthenovel.He asserts that'boredomand tedium' areattheheartofJacinto's characterization, making hisportrayal consistent withthatofmostofEça's protagonists.2 Thenovel,according to Coleman,received a favourable reception inPortugal andwas disliked by mostforeign readersforits 'highlynationalistic' toneand 'reactionary pastoralism'.3 Ata simplistic level,itis easyto seewhytheEstadoNovo promoted A Cidadee As Serrasanddiscouraged thestudy ofO Crimedo PadreAmaro,The former allowed theregimeto 'recuperar ideologicamente 'a writerwho preemptively struckat one of Salazar's principal backers through hisdepiction oftheCatholic church inthelatter.4 However, asMariaLuciaLePecki hasmadeclear, A CidadeeAsSerras isa muchmore ambiguous textthanideologically premised readings havecountenanced.5 CarlosReis'sassertion that'o narrador não deixaa menordúvidaacerca dos sentimentos que experimenta emrelaçãoa Jacinto', a feeling heterms 'umindesmentível apreço',isweakened byLePecki'sclosetextual analysis, 1 Eça de Queirós, A Cidade e As Serras(Mem Martins:Publicações Europa-América,[n.d.]), p. 68. Pagereferences inthetextareto thisedition. 2 AlexanderColeman, Eça de Queirós and European Realism (New York & London: New YorkUniversity Press,1980),p. 271. Coleman,p. 268. 4 Carlos Reis,'O escritor estána obra', Jornalde Letras,Artese Ideias,6-8 (2000),6. Maria Lúcia LePecki,Eça na ambiguidade(Lisbon:Jornaldo Fundão, 1974). JACINTO'S QUEST IN A CIDADE E AS SERRAS 6$ in whichshe pointsout thata negativeconnotation accompaniesJosé Fernandes's useoftheword'principe' on sixty-five occasions.6 The ironic ambiguity thatseepsintothenarrator's voicecan be readas morethana disavowalof Jacinto'spoliticalpostures.It is flirtatious, and conceals sentiments that exceedReis's'indesmentível apreço'. Eça's useofthefirst-person narrative voiceinA Cidadee AsSerrasisan interesting choice thathas a seriesof ramifications. He sets halfthe narrative inParis,whereheserved as a diplomat from 1889,andportrays thecityas theepicentre ofimmorality and vice,thenreturns hisnarrator andhisfriend totheinnocence andbeautyofthePortuguese countryside. Clearly, Eça, often criticized forhisstatusas an 'estrangeirado', performs a patriotic gesture replete withquintessential 'saudades'inthisposthumouslypublishedwork .The first-person narrative voice maybe read to approximate thelatter-end sentiments ofan authorwhohadbeenacerbic inhisearlier literary depictions ofPortuguese society. Ata diegetic level, the lack of an omniscient narratorbringsperspectives into play, and prohibits thereader's entry intoJacinto's mind.Thislimitation allowsfor a reading between thelinesbecauseallthereadereverknowsiswhatJosé Fernandes allowshimorhertoglimpse. Jacinto's friend distils thenarrative andimbuesevery detailwitha simultaneously obliqueandovertaffection forhis 'príncipe'.The reader,everconsciousof thenarrator's voice,is forced to relyon thewordsand interpret theactionsoftherecuperable dilettante. Atthesametime, sincethefocusofJoséFernandes's story is a character other thanhimself, thereader learns very little aboutthenarrator beyond anapparent total,ifironic, dedication toJacinto. Jacinto'smainproblemin thetextis thathe has losthisphallus.Or rather, hehasnever found it.Asthenarrative evolves, itbecomes clearthat external influences, amongthemactsofnatureand gentlecajolingfrom JoséFernandes, impeltheprotagonist to claimthattotemofmasculinity. LikeCarlosMaia andAmaroVieirabefore him, Jacinto hasnofather. He hasnever passedthrough theOedipalphasesincehehasnofather tobury. Anadditional complication ishislackofrealcontact withwomen.InParis, heprefers thecompany ofmen,yawning at themeremention offemales (p. 55). He holds sharesin the expensivecourtesanDiana de Lorge 'meramente por civismo,para dotara cidade com uma cocottemonumental 'butsignificantly neither knowsnorcareswhatcolourherskinis 'dos ombrosparabaixo' (p. 38).He becomestotally dependent on 'seuZé Fernandes' (p. 77),particularly forhisvisits toMadamed'Oriol'sparlour. The narrator declares:'eu compreendi que o meupríncipe (à maneirado divinoAquiles,que soba tenda,e juntoda branca,insípida e dócilBriséis, 6 Carlos Reis, Estatuto e perspectivado narrador na ficção de Eça de Queirós, 3rd edn (Coimbra:LivrariaAlmedina,1984),235-36. 66 PHILLIP ROTHWELL nuncadispensavaPatoclo)desejavater,no retiro do amor,a presença, o conforto e o socorroda amizade'(p. 77). The analogywiththecharacters from theIliad is telling. Achilles'passionforBriséispales incomparison withhisdeeper loveforPatroclus. Theslavegirlisa temporary distraction, anasidefrom thehomosocial framework oftheTrojanWar. In orderforJacinto...

The Real and the Formal: Legal Realism Revisited

The article aims to pursue a reassessment of one fundamental binary opposition legal realism invokes - the real and the formal. While some of the realist objections to the formal, mechanistic concept of adjudication have been insightful, the realist writers have been for the most part unaware of some of the formalistic and ultimately self-refuting presuppositions of their own rhetoric. This article argues that realism betrays its very rationale and mimics the mainstream formalism, as it effectively supplants the formalistic considerations of law as a system of rules with its own markedly formalistic preoccupations of law as the right method or theory. The article ventures to indicate some of the realist associations with the earlier European realism, with that of Françoise Gény in particular, which have consistently been neglected in the traditional assessments of the legal realist critical legacy. In so doing, the article relies not only on deconstructive strategies, but it also greatly presumes both the Wittgensteinean argument on ‘privacy’ and Stanley Fish’s critique of formalism in literary and legal studies.

Epochenbuch Realismus: Romane und Erzahlungen

Swales, Martin. Epochenbuch Realismus: Romane und Erzahlungen. Berlin: Schmidt, 1997. 204 pp. DM 39.80 paperback. This comprehensive introduction to German realism, which is aimed at a lay audience as well as a scholarly one, problematizes the cliche of a German Sonderweg and takes issue with the common view that German realism, by comparison with European versions (above all French and English), is defined by lacks and failures. Swales points instead to similar elements in the theories of German and European realism that reflect affinities between the fictional traditions themselves: (1) the dichotomy between the prosaic sphere (bound up with social conformity) and poetic impulses (associated with individual resistance and freedom); (2) l'effet de reel (Roland Barthes), or the verbal recapitulation of the material world; and (3) the role of the city-in European realism, the metropolis and in German realism, the Heimatstadt or provincial hometown. Yet the true value of Swales's book as a revisionist study lies in his illumination of the ways in which German realism is distinctive. He demonstrates that the political and cultural idiosyncrasies in Germany's background result in a realist mode that is highly reflective and self-reflexive, concerned throughout with the mental processes that perceive the outer world and shape its narration. His attention to the dynamics of reflection and narration leads Swales to emphasize questions of form and style, a feature that distinguishes his study from those of Erich Auerbach and others who have dismissed German realism as thematically inferior to its European counterparts and links it to Richard Brinkmann's landmark Wirklichkeit und Illusion (first published in 1957) and, more recently, Robert Holub's Reflections of Realism (1991). A further difference between Swales's study and many others is his concentration on the novel (with a few exceptions), which he regards as a more effective vehicle than the Novelle for the social criticism that lies at the heart of the realist enterprise. Following several chapters on the theory and history of realism, Swales presents lucid textual explications of prose works ranging chronologically from Gutzkow's Wally, die Zweiflerin and Immermann's Die Epigonen, both of which he discusses as self-reflexive texts that call the process of narration into question, to Mann's Buddenbrooks, representing in Swales's spectrum the point where inwardness and outwardness, subjectivity and the public realm, are intimately intertwined. …

The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa

This text explores the ways in which colonial Europeans have been represented in African ritual art and drama. Kramer sets out to show that African images of Europeans - in sculpture, masquerades and above all spirit possession - are the reverse and also the counterpart of European images of the Other as savage, whether noble or ignoble. In ways which may echo 19th-century European realism, they reveal the power of the detail: a feather, a car, or the eponymous red fez which runs like a leitmotif through spirit possession cults of the early colonial period. The Red Fez demonstrates not only the startling likenesses to ourselves and our culture, but also reflections of forms of knowledge which this civilization has submerged.

The other face of modernization: The collapse of rural society in east central European realism and naturalism

The other face of modernization: The collapse of rural society in east central European realism and naturalism

The guises of modesty: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's female artists

One hundred years ago Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) enjoyed within German-speaking countries the stature of a George Eliot, and her style and thematic interests resembled those of her English contemporary. Today, however, her fame has faded, and she is mainly known only to specialists, partly because her 'canon' has shrunk to a few prose works which are more reconciliatory than critical, falsely suggesting her to be a passive, conventional writer: her 'happy endings' have diverted her readers from the critical messages beneath the surface. By close analysis of a variety of works spanning the whole of her career, The Guises of Modesty calls attention to the author's beginnings in the genres of drama and satire and shows her to be considerably more complex and abrasive than most literary scholars have assumed; Professor Rose argues that only by censoring or disguising the female artist, a prominent figure in her satirical writings, was Ebner able to conceal her 'unwomanly' aspirations to become a recognized author. She explores Ebner's frequently ambivalent attitudes towards other writers whose work influenced her own, including Schiller, her preoccupation with cultural harbingers of modernity, such as Nietzsche and Ibsen, and parallels with other prominent literary women, such as George Eliot and Louise von Francois. The Guises of Modesty is the first feminist study of Ebner's artist novellas; it will be invaluable to students and scholars working in the areas of Women's Studies, European Realism, and fin-de-siecle Vienna. PROFESSOR ROSE teaches at Grinnell College.

Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative , and: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity , and: Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject (review)

Reviewed by: Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative, and: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, and: Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject Vincent P. Pecora Bruce Henricksen . Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992. 201 pp. $34.95 cloth, $13.95 paper. Robert Hampson . Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity. New York: St. Martin's, 1992. 326 pp. No price given. Andrea White . Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 233 pp. No price given. Located at a cultural crossroads where European realism and imperialism collide head on, Joseph Conrad's novels have been central to debates over the meaning of modern literature for most of this century. That the arguments—and the monographs—continue to emerge with such enthusiasm is a fit topic for inquiry in its own right. For well over a decade now, from Said to Eagleton to Jameson to Achebe, Conrad's prominent position as the great demystifier of the imperial lie, popular racism, romantic adventure, and Victorian morality has become increasingly uncertain. Each of the three books under review here attempts a rescue operation of sorts, with varying degrees of qualification. None tells us anything radically new about Conrad's work—an inevitable risk in devoting yet one more book to so dense a field—but they all address important issues. As his title implies, Bruce Henricksen focuses on the relation between subjectivity and narrative voice, discussing five of Conrad's major novels: The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes. Henricksen's approach derives from Bakhtin and Lyotard, in that the heteroglossia of non-authoritarian speech and the petits récits of non-authoritarian history are made to intersect in Conrad's prose. Henricksen also sees development from novel to novel: the "demise of romantic notions of the self" yields an increasingly decentered subject and, with Under Western Eyes, a rather redemptive "vision of the communal nature of selfhood and subjectivity." It is a familiar enough critical narrative—Western cultural hegemony is undone by a deconstructed subjectivity to produce a more open and giving community—that at times seems Procrustean. But Henricksen is admirably clear in explaining his theoretical tools and his readings of the novels are often insightful, especially as a challenge to critics, like Aaron Fogel, who stress the monologic drift of Conrad's storytelling. On the whole, however, I do not see the degree of "speech diversity" Henricksen sees in Conrad, and I have grave doubts about the way Henricksen relates devices like narrative voice to notions of community and society that he takes from Tönnies. In Nigger of the "Narcissus," for example, we are supposed to see eight different "internal accents" that "'appropriate' the narrative authority": voices in turn ethnocentric, literary, [End Page 171] paternal, idealizing, historical, moralizing, disciplinary, and liberal reformist (an implied reader). Discounting the last voice, which is "absent" in any case, it is difficult to understand how these "constitute a spectrum of subject positions" in the novel. Most readers would be hard pressed to distinguish one from the other—where does the "paternal" stop and the "moralizing" or "disciplinary" begin?—and even Henricksen must hedge occasionally by calling them "modulations" of one another. Things are even muddier when we turn to the traditional stylistic problem in Nigger of the "Narcissus": inconsistent point of view. Henricksen claims that "individualism and special interests" (that is, the capitalist Gesellschaft) are "suggested by the more individualistic tone of the 'they' narrator," whereas "older, communal claims" (the organic Gemeinschaft) are implied by the "we" voice; and that the "I" of the final pages reflects a conservative author trying vainly to write with sympathy about labor in a capitalist age. But the allegory, thin from the start, is also confusing. Henricksen later aligns the novel's "three-phased drift in point of view"—from omniscient (they) to a blend of omniscient and subjective (they and we) to fully individualized (I)—with an historical evolution that runs from the organic community to a transitional "balance" to a modern society riven by special interests...

The Discontents of Civilization in Wuthering Heights and Buddenbrooks

E MILY BRONTE'S Wuthering Heights (1847) and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901) are rarely mentioned in the same breath. Certainly the settings could not be more different: the lonely, windswept English moors are a far cry from the bustling Hanseatic city of prosperous burghers. Wiuthering Heights focuses exclusively on two families, omitting the broad panorama usually associated with nineteenthcentury realism. Buddenbrooks, in contrast, is often seen as the culmination of European realism; Mann himself termed it a realist social novel in the guise of a family saga (Miszellen 209). Bronte's pagan work shocked readers: One contemporary reviewer complained that it doesn't charm.' Mann's novel charmed so many readers that it quickly became a bestseller. Further contrasts could easily be adduced. Yet the two novels possess some striking similarities. The most important is that both are generational family novels, each arguably the most outstanding example of the genre in its own country. Hitherto, Wuthering Heights has been examined primarily as a female version of the Gothic romance; it has seldom even been classified as a family novel.2 A comparison of Wuthering Heights and Buddenbrooks as generational family novels, however, sheds new light on the individual works themselves as well as on the genre. As Herbert Lindenberger observes, thejuxtapos-

"Neglecting the Weight of the Elephant...": German Prose Fiction and European Realism

"Neglecting the Weight of the Elephant...": German Prose Fiction and European Realism

Alexander Coleman, "Eça de Queirós and European Realism" (Book Review)

Alexander Coleman, "Eça de Queirós and European Realism" (Book Review)

Georg Lukacs's Theory of the Novel

The rather belated discovery of the work of Georg Lukacs in the West and, most recently, in this country, has tended to solidify the notion of a very deep split between the early, non-Marxist and the later Marxist Lukacs. It is certainly true that a sharp distinction in tone and purpose sets off such early essays as Die Seele und die Formen (1911) and Die Theorie des Romans (1914-15) from recently translated essays on literary subjects such as the Studies in European Realism (1953) or the political pamphlet Wieder den mij3verstandenen Realismus (1957) published here under the title Realism. But the distinction can be overstated and misunderstood. It would be unsound, for instance, to hold on to the reassuring assumption that all the evil in the later Lukacs came in as a result of his Marxist conversion; a considerable degree of continuity exists between a pre-Marxist work such as Die Theorie des Romans and the Marxist Geschichte und Klassenbewuf3tsein; it would be impossible for an admirer of the former to dismiss the latter entirely. There is a similar danger in an oversimplified view of a good early and a bad late Lukacs. The works on realism have been treated very harshly on their American publication by such diverse critics as Harold Rosenberg (in Dissent) and Peter Demetz (in the Yale Review); on the other hand, The Theory of the Novel is being called by Harry Levin! (JHI, January-March 1965, p. 150)