Genre Of Realism Research Articles

DOSTOEVSKY’S REALISM: CONTINUATION OF THE DISPUTE

The aim of the article is to determine the connection between F. M. Dostoevsky’s creative work with the phenomenon denoted in the modern literary studies by the terms of “spiritual realism,” “Christian realism,” “religious realism,” “symbolic realism,” etc. The writer worked in the genre of realism, he called himself a realist, and it is easy to notice the features of social, psychological, philosophical and even political realism in his works. However, at the same time, there was always something else in them that was more significant and added unique originality to the writer’s works. Many modern researchers believe that the foundations of this phenomenon lie in the common cultural European Christian tradition. Having studied various research approaches with the method of comparative analysis, author of the article comes to the conclusion that the most accurate term denoting the features of Dostoevsky’s artistic method is “Orthodox realism.” The writer himself called his method “complete realism,” “realism in the highest sense,” absolutely rejecting the label of a writer-psychologist. This circumstance has attracted the attention of researchers more than once. While studying their points of view and analyzing Dostoevsky’s own views on the goals and objectives of artistic creativity, the author of the article concludes that “realism in the highest sense” is based on the principle of transforming the Orthodox view of the world into artistic imagery. Many features of this principle can be seen throughout Russian literature, but it was Dostoevsky who brought those features together, developed and strengthened the most productive of them, removed certain incidental and unsuccessful ones and created Orthodox realism as a full-fledged artistic method. Based on it, the novels of 1866–1890s and “The Writer’s Diary” were written.

Православный реализм в творчестве Ф. М. Достоевского

The article aims to define the artistic method of F.M. Dostoevsky in the light of new ideas about the ideological content and poetics of the writer’s works. As is known, Dostoevsky worked in the gen-re of realism, he called himself a realist, and it is easy to notice the features of social, psychological, philo-sophical, and even political realism in his writings. At the same time, there was always something else in them, something more significant and adding unique originality to the writer’s works. A number of modern researchers (I.B. Avanesyan, A.A.Alekseev, V.A.Voropaev, M.M.Dunaev, V.N.Zakharov, Yu.V.Le-bedev, A.M.Lyubomudrov, L.I.Saraskina, K.A.Stepanyan, A.N.Uzhankov, and others) consider this phenomenon to be grounded in the cultural European Christian tradition. The results of the study of Dostoev-sky’s works by means of historical-cultural and comparative-historical methods generally confirm this as-sumption, but it needs significant clarification. Using the comparative typological method, the author of the article explores various points of view on Dostoevsky’s poetics, systematizes the results obtained on the ba-sis of an original methodological approach, and comes to the conclusion that the most precise term convey-ing the features of the writer’s artistic method is ‘Orthodox realism’.It is known that Dostoevsky called his method ‘complete realism’, ‘realism in the highest sense’, ab-solutely rejecting the label of a writer-psychologist. This circumstance has repeatedly attracted the attention of researchers. While studying various concepts and analyzing Dostoevsky’s own views on the goals and objectives of artistic creativity, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that ‘realism in the highest sense’ is based on the principle of transforming the Orthodox view of the world into artistic imagery –‘Or-thodox realism’. It has been the main principle of Russian literature since its appearance, having countless embodiments in the works of Russian writers. Dostoevsky creatively rethought the experience of European and Russian Christian literature and raised the method of Orthodox realism to an unattainable height.

Sentimentalism, Realism, and Secularity in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth

Abstract: Critics of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth have interpreted Lily Bart's death and Nettie Struther's story as scenes that undermine the novel's realism. I show how they reveal Wharton's negotiation of transcendence within the genre of realism. Nettie's redemption and Lily's death destabilize a secular mode of economic exchange, offering a way to transcend this mode by means of a gift exchange. I argue that the idea of the gift embedded in Netty's story and Lily's death operates both as a scandal and vehicle of transcendence

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary StudiesCharacter as Form

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary StudiesCharacter as Form

Why Was It the Ming Dynasty that Engendered the Guanxi Motif in Fiction?

Compared to other informal social network mechanisms, guanxi is more common in China and is the most typical. Even in daily life, it is indispensable. Hence, in Chinese fiction, the guanxi motif is prevalent and important. Interestingly, before the Ming dynasty, guanxi was not a literary motif in fiction. This article suggests that three factors contributed to the rise of the guanxi motif in fiction in the Ming dynasty. The first was the boom in fiction writing, especially in the genre of realism, that occurred in this era, which expanded the scope of literary representation. The second was the degradation of public morals in the Ming dynasty, a momentous social transition that Ming fiction writers noted and portrayed. Guanxi, as a disruptive social mechanism that dismantled previous models of human connection, became a focus in their works. The third was the fact that the atmosphere of money worship promoted by guanxi, together with official corruption, facilitated widespread social inequality. Guanxi, as the crux of inequity, inspired writers to expose social turpitude. More importantly, the guanxi motif satisfied the need for plot conflict in literary works. Thus, it became a necessary motif in Ming fiction.

Romance after Critique

Romance after Critique Scott Black (bio) A postcritical eighteenth century might be an eighteenth century without the novel, or at least with the novel put in its place as one prose genre among several. Different genres, of course, make different demands and afford different practices of reading. To recognize that many of our default ways of reading are informed by the formal assumptions of the novel—a genre of realism, representation, and modernity—is also to recognize that there are, and were, other ways of reading, other kinds of texts, and other patterns of literary history. Fredric Jameson observes "the history of the novel is inevitably the history of the realist novel."1 But the history of fiction is not inevitably the history of the novel. Jameson has defined the "ideal of realism" as "a narrative discourse which in one form or another unites the experience of daily life with a properly cognitive, mapping, or well-nigh scientific perspective."2 I'm interested in what comes into focus if we discard the category of the novel, with its mapping of ordinary experience, and consider modes of fiction that operate outside those exigencies. What becomes visible if we reject the seemingly automatic assumptions that the novel is what modern prose fiction is and the tendency and telos of literary history? For Georg Lukács, the novel is the indigenous genre of modernity, "the form of mature virility" by which we moderns comprehend ourselves as modern, estranged from the immanence of traditional meaning but compensated by an enlightened, demystified understanding and what Michael McKeon characterizes as the "negative freedom of autonomous self-recognition."3 But do we only read [End Page 317] for these brave, manly, and heroic exigencies? I want to suggest that the category of the novel, with its focus on realism, mapping, and modernity, is not adequate for all fiction—and not even in the modern world. I pose four intertwined questions. What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? What other forms might we recognize, and what other demands, pleasures, and practices of reading might emerge by sidelining the novel? Fiction without the novel is romance, a modality of story less concerned with rendering ordinary life or serving a useful moral, psychological, or political purpose than with affording experiences that are avowedly extraordinary and valuable for just that reason. Romance is also a name for anachronism and so a reminder that we are never fully modern, defined by a single time, or existing in a single timescale. Rather, we are dense overlays of evolved nature and interwoven cultures of multiple provenance, tangled roots, and manifold impurities. Romance also names the entropy of literary history, the way forms decay but also drift, survive, and sometimes even thrive in distant and foreign worlds. Literary history without the novel is turbulent and recursive, not organized by the trajectories of modernity and progress but a record of accident, indirection, improper passion, and sometimes willful mistakes. To tell this story, we need a looser sense of history that's responsive to chance and entropy and a weaker sense of agency that's shared across local use and the subtle momentum of the forms we adopt. At the heart of such an eighteenth century might be two parables of the survival of anachronistic forms and the drift of fictions, Don Quixote and The Arabian Nights, both of which stage the problems, pleasures, and possibilities of storytelling and reading in ways that remain enormously helpful and neither of which can be even remotely accounted for in strictly national or contextual terms. Yet both of these foundational works had enormous impact on the cultures that borrowed them, adapted them, and made them their own. And they are still vibrantly entertaining and wonderful to teach to students who like, quite rightly, to read about divine fools, djinns, crossed lovers, fantasy, baroque cruelties, and all the other stuff that's bled out of the realism we piously insist is the only worthy material of literary education. I take romance not merely as the prehistory of the novel but also its alter ego, its contemporary and complement—and...

Misdirections, Delayed Disclosures, and the Ethics of the Telling in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend

This essay explores the ethics of the telling of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend from a rhetorical perspective to demonstrate the ethical implications of misdirections and delayed disclosures, which create a multi-layered author-audience relationship. Our Mutual Friend has received much critical attention but very little has focused on the ethical implications of form for the relationship between Dickens and his audience. By examining the techniques of synthetic functions of character, double communication, misdirections, delayed disclosures, and narratorial devices of uncertainty, this essay demonstrates the consequences (for the genre of realism, the ethics of readerly judgment, the ethics of performance and play) and the rewards of reconfiguring the novel through attention to the synthetic dimension of acts of reading, themes, and characters. I offer some new directions for understanding Dickens’s multi-layered relationships with his readers in Our Mutual Friend, including a focus on perception, interpretation, and judgment; the cognitive pleasure of dealing with techniques that offer both immersion and defamiliarization; and the explicit awareness of the meta-fictional engagement offered by Dickens as designer. I offer a new argument about the nuances of implied author–narrator relationships in heterodiegetic narration, about the significance of mimetic and synthetic components of readerly and textual dynamics and their implications for genre, and about the ethics of the telling in narratives whose effects depend on misdirection and reconfiguration.

Specters of Smith: Adam Smith's “Invisible Hand” and Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit

In Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007, economist Gary B. Gorton uses the metaphor of invisibility to explain our current global financial crisis. The main reason why the “Great Recess...

<em>The ‘Invisible Hand’ and British Fiction, 1818–1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism</em>, by Eleanor Courtemanche

<em>The ‘Invisible Hand’ and British Fiction, 1818–1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism</em>, by Eleanor Courtemanche

The Postcolonial Novel. Richard J. Lane . Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006. Pp. v+146.

<i>The Postcolonial Novel</i>. Richard J. Lane . Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006. Pp. v+146.

Heaven and Hell on Earth: Visualizing the Unseen World of American Realism

Heaven and Hell on Earth: Visualizing the Unseen World of American Realism Robert E. Brown (bio) Gregory S. Jackson. The Word and Its Witness: The Spiritualization of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xiv + 409 pp. Reproductions, photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.00. American literary realism has traditionally been understood as an attempt to identify with the relentlessly unsentimental elements of life, an approach to writing impelled by the notion that literature is authentic only to the degree that it inhabits the unvarnished truth of human existence. Gregory Jackson’s The Word and Its Witness offers a bold and ambitious revision of the historical and conceptual parameters of American realism, expanding the term so as to include literary precursors found principally in the American Protestant homiletic tradition, as well as the religious literature of the late nineteenth century, particularly religious fiction. Thus it draws on a broad range of materials, including sermons, primers, pamphlets, catechisms, grave iconography, novels, and photography—material not typically incorporated in the genre of realism—while drawing parallels between these materials and contemporary forms of religious communication, such as video games and dramatic reenactments. What is the “real” in American realism? In a sense, this is the underlying question that animates Jackson’s study. Is it, as it is often portrayed, a literary genre informed by an ideological quest for an empirical, materialist, and ultimately secularized understanding of the world in the face of the grim nature of life in post–Civil War, industrialized, urban America? Or can it rightly be defined more broadly as an epistemological search for the world as it really is, that world that really exists, even if portions of that world lie beyond the apprehension of the physical senses? Jackson opts for the latter, and in doing so extends the notion of realism beyond its narrowly contextualized understanding as a formal period of critical American literature. What justifies such an expansion of categories for Jackson is the claim that secular and religious forms of realism are closely linked in their quest to discover the nature of the world that human beings inhabit: “spiritual and secular forms [End Page 17] thus share a genealogy that produced the formal and thematic conventions that we have come to associate with . . . the postbellum emergence of literary realism” (p. 6). This expansive consideration of a spiritualized realism begins with colonial and antebellum anxieties over changes in the epistemological and theological landscape. In response to the emphasis on experience as the primary mediator of knowledge and on individual agency as the path to self-realization, the proprietors of religious knowledge sought to develop a Protestant pedagogy that took into account these new assumptions about the way human beings gained and retained an understanding of their religious faith. They augmented their homiletic discourse with more visual forms of language aimed at increasing audience participation, creating a virtual form of experience by way of the imagination, and thus offering experiences through which spiritual reality could be encountered, contemplated, and finally resolved in the reader/listener’s moral responses to them. What makes the literature of this period “realistic” in Jackson’s estimation is its shared concern to call attention to the stark realities of the unseen world and its tangible connection to the visible world, particularly to the spiritual, moral, and psychological dynamics of lived religious life. This work is bound to provoke considerable discussion among specialists in the many subject areas and disciplines on which the author weighs in; nonetheless it is a compelling read for scholars in the fields of, among others, American literature, religion, and history. What historical context provoked the early American turn to religious realism? In a word, hell. Or more properly, the loss of hell as a closely felt reality for colonial Americans, and more generally, the lightening of the religious mood—a loss of anxiety over quintessential Puritan doctrines concerning the severity of God. Growing colonial economic prosperity, political security, and religious pluralism, combined with a moral optimism characteristic of the Enlightenment, undermined the force of a theological system that emphasized God’s inscrutable grace and wrath, manifest in the Calvinist doctrine of election. In its place was a...