Literary Realism Research Articles

Deep distant reading: The rise of realism in Scandinavian literature as a case study

AbstractIn this article we make a case for a synchronic and contextualizing perspective on the scaling of literary data, one which qualifies and expands the data points in terms of depth, or thickness, through the help of metadata on the social and historical conditions of the texts. Our case study is an investigation of the rise and impact of realism in a corpus of more than 800 Danish and Norwegian novels from 1870 to 1899 with three, interlocking critical and methodological aims. We use textual features to model realism in a large corpus of Danish‐language novels. We compare the features driving that model to the ones that were important to the historical and critical development of realism as a literary project. And we use the results of our model to study the interplay between realism and social history. Our findings suggest that realism was more prominent and more widely distributed in Danish‐language novels of the late nineteenth century than the critical tradition has usually acknowledged. Women appear to have written realist fiction not only at rates similar to men, but at times and with features that are difficult to distinguish from their male counterparts. The article relies on—and insists on further—dialogue between digital and analog approaches to the exploration of cultural data.

‘Typical characters under typical circumstances’: The Slum Fiction of Dorothy Hewett and Ruth Park

In this article I compare the representation of working people in two novels, Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948) and Dorothy Hewett’s Bobbin Up (1959), as well as the ensuing critical debate about realism in their depictions of slum life in Sydney. I show that while Hewett’s work is more class-conscious and agitational, Park’s novel comes alive in deeper intersectional ways through her awareness of the interwoven structures of gender, class and race. Although Hewett’s novel culminates in a strike by women mill workers, Park reveals more of the individual strategies of survival that form part of the working-class lives she portrays. Thus, using Friedrich Engels’ critical point about ‘typical characters under typical circumstances’, I argue that while both writers try to capture the fundamental experience of working-class people, this is more successfully done in Park’s novel, both in terms of its literary realism and implicit radical politics.

Ранние «программные» тексты Льва Рубинштейна

The paper is devoted to the analysis of Lev Rubinstein’s early conceptual practices, in particular his conditional cycle “Program of Works”. The research is undertaken in order to comprehend the role of the cycle “Program of Works” in the formation of L. Rubinstein’s poetic world at its early stage and to expose its influence on the theory and practice of “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism” (B. Groys) of the 1970s-1980s. The authors of the paper outline the dynamics of Rubinstein’s experimental moves in his promotional texts “Program of Works” (1975), “The Next Program” (1975), “Catalog of Comedic Innovations” (1976), “This Is All” (1979), “Alphabetical Index of Poetry” (1980), “Event without a Name” (1980), “From the Beginning to the End” (1981), “Thirty-Five New Sheets” (1981), “The Program of Joint Experiences” (1981) and identify the inter-genre dominants of L. Rubinstein’s supraliterary text, formulate the principles of the conceptualist strategies put forward and tested by the poet in those years. The research is novel in that it is the first to consider L. Rubinstein’s early cycle “Program of Works” and identify the unity and interdependence of his “program” texts, to analytically reflect on the different-style searches of the poet at the early stage of his formation as a conceptualist poet. As a result, it has been proved that the nature of Rubinstein’s artistic search at the early stage was aimed at actively overcoming the “repressive” pressure of the principles and canons of literature (more broadly, culture) of socialist realism.

Элементы поэтики постмодернизма в романе М.Ю. Лермонтова «Герой нашего времени»

Literature on such a trend as postmodernism in the second half of the twentieth century took a leading position. It captured the crisis of modern thought that was brought on by rapid advances in science and technology, as well as disillusionment with the notions of European humanism. The expression of the crisis, the cultural rift in literature, occurred mainly through the form of a literary work – its destruction, deliberate “wrongness”, the blurring of genre boundaries and the lack of clear structures. In addition, techniques such as imitation, stylization, literary play, and the use of simulacra come to the fore. Postmodern approval was difficult in Russia in the 20th century due to socialist realism in literature. The first postmodern novel in Russian is considered being “Pushkin House” by Andrey Bitov. However, back in 1840, a novel was published, which includes numerous techniques and principles, later attributed to the poetics of postmodernism: this is the “Hero of Our Time” by M.Y. Lermontov. He often depicted the worldview of a person in a crisis era in his works. Ele-ments of literary poetics, which will later be called postmodern, we find not only in the designated novel but also in the whole corpus of Lermontov’s texts: “Mtsyri”, “Demon”, the essay “Cauca-sian” and others related to the so-called Caucasian corpus of Lermontov’s texts. This article at-tempts to identify these elements, analyze the pragmatics of their use, and study the forms of lit-erary play used by Lermontov. The optics we have chosen – Lermontov’s Caucasian works – is not accidental: many re-searchers have noted that in his work (especially in later works) the topos of the Caucasus out-grows the role of romantic orientalist scenery and gives an artistic conflict additional depth and fullness, saturates with unexpected and vivid details.

"Exploring Novel Methodologies -A Comparative Analysis of Realism and Modernism in Korean and Japanese Fiction from a Glocal Perspective-"

"Exploring Novel Methodologies -A Comparative Analysis of Realism and Modernism in Korean and Japanese Fiction from a Glocal Perspective-"

“Homo post scriptum” in the drama works of A. Platonov and N. Erdman: traditions and innovation

The problem of distinguishing text and reality is one of the main problems in the modernist culture of the twentieth century. The aim of a work is to show how the understanding of the world as a text, general to European cultural consciousness, is realized in the Russian literature of existential realism. The analysis is based on cultural-historical and historicalgenetic methods. At the center of the analysis is a type of character that has not previously been subjected to scientific understanding – “the person who has written”, “the person after writing”, “homo post scriptum”. In the picture of the world of Russian literature of existential realism of the 1920–1930s, the formula “life outside the text” is given as one of the ways to physically preserve oneself in an absurd reality. At the same time, reality itself, which destroys a person, breaks up into texts generated by itself, which represent only fragments of it. The mythological pan-semiotic integrity of the universe in the existential picture of the world is being destroyed, a total dehumanization of the text occurs. In the Russian literature of existential realism, the ideology of the worldview that we now call “postmodernism” is beginning to form. On the one hand, the Russian literature of existential realism is inscribed in the pan-European cultural context, and on the other hand, it continues the traditions of critical realism, where human actions are socially determined.

How do we regard fictional people? How do they regard us?

Readers assume that commonplace properties of the real world also hold in realistic fiction. They believe, for example, that the usual physical laws continue to apply. But controversy exists in theories of fiction about whether real individuals exist in the story's world. Does Queen Victoria exist in the world of Jane Eyre, even though Victoria is not mentioned in it? The experiments we report here find that when participants are prompted to consider the world of a fictional individual ("Consider the world of Jane Eyre . . ."), they are willing to say that a real individual (e.g., Queen Victoria) can exist in the same world. But when participants are prompted to consider the world of a real individual, they are less willing to say that a fictional individual can exist in that world. The asymmetry occurs when we ask participants both if a real person is in the character's world and if the person would appear there. However, the effect is subject to spatial and temporal constraints. When the person and the character share spatial and temporal settings, interchange is more likely to occur. These results shed light on the author's implicit contract with the reader, which can license the reader to augment a fictional world with features that the author only implicates as part of the work's background.

Summer Storms, Food and Representations of the Climate Crisis in Brit Bildøen’s Sju Dagar I August and Agnar Lirhus’s Liten Kokebok

"Summer Storms, Food, and Representations of the Climate Crisis in Brit Bildøen’s Sju dagar i august and Agnar Lirhus’s Liten kokebok. This article discusses representations of climate change in contemporary realistic fiction from Norway. I first focus my attention on the depiction of extreme weather and “risk society” in Brit Bildøen’s Sju dagar i august (Seven days in august, 2014) and then explore the concept of “ecological masculinities” and expressions of care in Agnar Lirhus’s Liten kokebok (Little cookbook, 2016). Although the two novels I discuss thematise climatic disruptions in different ways, they are similarly intertwining characters’ experiences of the natural world with personal feelings of loss and grief. I thus suggest that climate change imagery in Norwegian realistic fiction is often interwoven with an affective dimension. Finally, the aim of this article is to illustrate how the climate crisis has pervaded Norwegian literature, while providing some examples of how texts that lay outside of what is typically considered the cli-fi novel have the potential to engage with this theme. Keywords: climate change narratives, contemporary Norwegian fiction, risk society, extreme weather, ecological masculinities, care, Brit Bildøen, Agnar Lirhus"

What are you doing it for? Realist writing – the riddled boundary that divides fiction and reality

ABSTRACT In this essay, I respond to Australian author Charmian Clift’s question about writing: ‘what are you doing it for?’ (Wheatley 2022, 291). This question is the title of one of Clift’s essays, from a collection of narrative-driven essays, written for the Women’s Pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, after Clift’s return to Australia in 1964. I consider the similarities between realist fiction and writing that (by classification) purports to bear a closer allegiance to the author’s autobiographical life. I understand realist writing to be a representation of living | memory – the complicated and multi-faceted nature of our interior selfhood. This essay reflects my preoccupation with the cartwheels of our inner consciousness as it relates to what-I-write | how-I-write | why-I-write, and how we engage with the work of others, both writers we know in the everyday, and writers we ‘know’ through the page. I consider the act of producing narrative as a sensate response to enigma, a creative response to rumination and (perhaps) an antidote to ongoing rumination – shirking the discussion about autobiography in favour of a discussion about impetus – considering writing as a reflection upon the operations (and inherent conundrums) of an interior consciousness.

Pain and the Aesthetics of U.S. Literary Realism by Cynthia J. Davis (review)

Pain and the Aesthetics of U.S. Literary Realism by Cynthia J. Davis (review)

“Fourth‐wall breakiness or whatevs”: Presumed self‐awareness in American superhero comics

AbstractStudies on reflexivity in the field of comics studies have been scarce and, more often than not, disconnected from each other, which has resulted in overlapping, and sometimes even contradicting, classifications of reflexive devices. Therefore, this article analyzes different instances of self‐awareness in American superhero comics, as it has become quite a popular feature in recent years. In order to systematize the corpus of American comics which feature self‐aware characters, Pardo's theoretical model of reflexivity results highly advantageous due to the fact that its transmedia categories provide a useful framework to explore those elements which are particular to comics narration, such as panels, speech balloons, splash pages, and more of the like. At the same time, this theoretical model connects comics' self‐consciousness to the larger storytelling tradition of Western culture—after all, some of the most important studies on reflexivity stem from literary and film studies, from scholars such as Alter, Hutcheon, Waugh, and Stam, to mention a few. This article, then, provides a theoretical review of key definitions from the field of reflexivity before applying said categories to a corpus of American superhero comics which includes titles such as The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Black Hammer, and Empowered, as well as some Bat‐Mite strips and a few Deadpool and Harley Quinn issues. The analysis mainly focuses on the diegetic disruptions that self‐aware characters trigger in comics—particularly considering the formal elements of the medium—to prove that reflexivity, despite having been deemed as a tool to tackle serious existential and ontological issues in canonical works, operates as a bridge which brings readers as close as possible to the fictional realities in their favorite superhero comics.

Linguistic landscape in film works and video games

Linguistic landscape studies can yield information about the society inhabiting the given area: the use and distribution of languages, but also social structure and hierarchy of linguistic groups. For these reason, the linguistic landscape can be used in artworks to convey information regarding the fictional reality to the recipient. This paper aims to analyse what functions the linguistic landscape can perform in film works and video games, and how certain aspects of fictional realities are portrayed through the intentional use of linguistic landscapes.

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

Impossible Scale: Amitav Ghosh against History

Abstract Focusing on Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy—comprising the novels Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire—this article asks how novels can (or sometimes cannot) narrate the history of an ocean. Given the fact that realist novels are often strictly bounded by time and space, and by an imperative to offer detailed characterization and setting, there is a discrepancy between the scales of oceanic thinking and the capacities of the novel to do justice to them. Instead of turning to experimental forms that reimagine the possibilities of the novel, Ghosh reanimates the realist novel to tell the story of the opium trade across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. In doing so, he looks back to a conservative vision of empire while at the same time offering flashes of radical critique. At its most inventive, the Ibis trilogy reconfigures novelistic plot as a horizontally organized system rather than a vertically organized flow and retools the realist novel for a different scale of time and space. Despite attempts to claim Ghosh for a radical politics, or to induct him into a pantheon of historians, these novels create a complicated world, often profoundly incompatible with itself. Ghosh grapples with the challenges of scale—of how to narrate large-scale historical processes while at the same time paying due mind to his unwavering commitment to setting a scene.

The Privilege of Art

The Privilege of Art

Reality Deterioration and Academic Precarity through the Lens of J. S. Le Fanu’s Wylder’s Hand and ‘The Haunted Baronet’

The immersive, fictional space that Irish gothicist Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu calls his reader to occupy has been underexplored in existing critical literature. This article draws on comments made by China Miéville to demonstrate the power of Le Fanu’s efforts to pull readers into his fictional world in the critically neglected Wylder’s Hand and ‘The Haunted Baronet’. This immersion can allow readers to feel the social critiques embedded in this fiction more powerfully because, while imaginatively occupying this world, they are made to witness – and are implicated in the construction of realities in – Le Fanu’s fictional communities. This reality creation is a process that can be better understood through the lens of social constructionism, allowing insight into how Le Fanu’s fictional communities steadily form often unjust, inadequate visions of reality through interactions in those communities. Further, this article explores one potential application of this visceral experience as social critique. When we close the pages of the text, we can start to explore the mirroring of those fictional experiences with the experience of existing in the neoliberal structures present in academia. Such structures are often constructed, like Le Fanu’s fictional realities, into unjust shapes that both victimize the most vulnerable and steadily reveal their inadequacy. The ways in which Wylder’s Hand and ‘The Haunted Baronet’ prompt readers to recognize and move beyond flawed, constructed, deteriorating frameworks highlight the new critiques we can discover in Le Fanu’s fiction by examining the effects of this radical immersion into which the fiction invites us. It also points to the importance of analyzing Le Fanu’s fiction more broadly, beyond his most critically discussed works, to find more insightful ways of reading and understanding the implications of his fiction.

Contemporary Transnational Historical Fiction: Forging Solidarities in the Global South Novel

Abstract This article diagnoses and discusses the emergence of a set of contemporary realist novels that engage with historical events, connect disparate parts of the global South through depicting travel or displacement, and feature subaltern protagonists. Exemplified by Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy, these novels stage a reengagement with the archives of imperialism and oppression to discuss global rather than national histories, from the viewpoint of the marginalized. Frameworks such as the postcolonial historical novel or postmodern historiographical metafiction obscure the novelty of these texts, which signal a shift from the national to the transnational, from postmodernism to dense realism, and from the “middling” protagonist to marginal, subaltern protagonists. Working through close readings of two representative novels, Peter Kimani's Dance of the Jakaranda (2017) and Esi Edugyan's Washington Black (2018), the article proposes that the framework of the global South novel is more relevant, as these novels respond to the same stimuli—disillusionment with the nation-state and globalization, and a concrete investment in subaltern solidarity as a counternarrative to these earlier reactions to the end of colonialism and the Cold War—that global South theorists are addressing. It concludes by arguing for the value of defining the genre of the global South novel intrinsically, from the content and form of the work, rather than extrinsically, on the basis of the author's origin, the place of publication, or the setting of the work.

Always Be Prepared

Always Be Prepared

Prosthetic Grand Synthesis

Prosthetic Grand Synthesis

Instructing the Reader of Metafiction: Nabokov & Gombrowicz

This article compares and contrasts Vladimir Nabokov's and Witold Gombrowicz's various kinds of instructions in order to find out how they work in metafiction. The complicated relationship with the readerdom—a struggle (Gombrowicz) or a clash (Nabokov)—is discussed within an intertwined framework of theoretical approaches to audiences, readers, and the texts. This examination aims at a shift of the study of metafiction—fiction which problematizes its fictional reality—to an aesthetic-response perspective while characterizing a specific type: instructive metafiction. In Gombrowicz's case, one and the same instruction may appear several times, because it is only that way that mythology is created, and instructions turn out to be what Gombrowicz calls "Form," which is to be wrestled with by the implied reader. In Nabokov's case, instructions place the implied reader in the created world, in which he is "the perfect dictator" so that he could also control the reader as a fictional character, for as long as we "live" in his house, we ought to obey his house rules. Thus, this essay probes a scholarly discussion on metafiction with a self-reflexive layer by not only (re) reading with authorial instructions, and (un)reading against them, but also by analyzing instructions themselves and their interaction with various audiences.