Book Description

Few literary phenomena are as elusive and yet as persistent as realism. While it responds to the perennial impulse to use literature to reflect on experience, it also designates a specific set of literary and artistic practices that emerged in response to Western modernity. Landscapes of Realism is a two-volume collaborative interdisciplinary investigation of this vast territory, bringing together leading-edge new criticism on the realist paradigms that were first articulated in nineteenth-century Europe but have since gone on globally to transform the literary landscape. Tracing the manifold ways in which these paradigms are developed, discussed and contested across time, space, cultures and media, this second volume shows in its four core essays and twenty-four case studies four major pathways through the landscapes of realism: The psychological pathways focusing on emotion and memory, the referential pathways highlighting the role of materiality, the formal pathways demonstrating the dynamics of formal experiments, and the geographical pathways exploring the worlding of realism through the encounters between European and non-European languages from the nineteenth century to the present.This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount: