Realism: Aesthetics, Experiments, Politics (eBook, ePUB)

Redaktion: Elze, Jens

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Realism seems to be everywhere, both as a trending critical term and as a revitalized aesthetic practice. This volume brings together for the first time three aspects that are pertinent for a proper understanding of realism: its 19th-century aesthetics committed to making reality into an object of serious art; the experiments with and against realism by 20th-century modernist, postmodernist, or magical realist writing; and the politics of realism, especially its ambitions to map the complex realities produced by global capitalism and climate catastrophe. This juxtaposition of aesthetics, experiments, and politics unsettles the entrenched opposition between realism and experimental literature that tends to ignore the fact that realism, by virtue of its commitment to a changing material and social world, cannot be but continuously experimenting.

The innovative chapters of this book address some of the pressing questions of literary and cultural studies today, like the complex relation between historical materialism and new materialisms, between science and art, or the different aesthetic and political affordances of making systemic analyses against depicting the specificity of the local. Some of the chapters deal with classically realist authors, such as George Eliot, Émile Zola, and Joseph Conrad, to gauge the aesthetic radicalism of their diverse realist projects. Others investigate the experimental engagements with realism by authors such as B.S. Johnson, J.M. Coetzee, or Rachel Cusk. Yet others, analyze the politics of realism found in contemporary anglophone novels by writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Mitchell, or Rohinton Mistry. The readings assembled here are a testament to the diversity of literary realism(s) from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and to the ongoing controversies surrounding definitions and deployments of "realism."

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 296
• Erscheinungstermin: 7. April 2022
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781501385490
• Artikelnr.: 63685842

Autorenporträt

Jens Elze is Assistant Professor of English at University of Goettingen, Germany. He is author of Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel: Literatures of Precarity (2017) and editor of Das Enigma des Pikaresken / The Enigma of the Picaresque (2018).

Inhaltsangabe

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Realism
Political Aesthetics
and (New) Materialism (Jens Elze
Georg August University of Göttingen
Germany) Part I. Aesthetics 1. "Uses of 'Realism'": A Term in History and the History of a Term (Andreas Mahler
Free University of Berlin
Germany) 2. George Eliot's Realisms (Nadine Böhm-Schnitker
Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
Germany) 3. Medical Realism and the Magic of Reality: Art and Insight in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders and Émile Zola's Le docteur Pascal (Maren Scheurer
Goethe University Frankfurt
Germany) 4. Conrad on Epidemics: From The Shadow-Line to Covid-19 (and Back) (Nidesh Lawtoo
KU Leuven
Belgium) Part II. Experiments 5. "Should I Call It Horror?": Reflecting Realism by Exploring Contingency in Ror Wolf's Adventure Series Pilzer und Pelzer (Barbara Bausch
Free University of Berlin
Germany) 6. Trawling Truth: B.S. Johnson's Evacuation of Realist Epistemology (André Otto
Humboldt University of Berlin
Germany) 7. Cultural Realism: Reconsidering Magical Realism in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine (Nasrin Babakhani
Georg August University of Göttingen
Germany) 8. Narrative as Realistic Thinking (Kai Wiegandt
Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen
Germany) Part III. Politics 9. Realism for Sustainability (Caroline Levine
Cornell University
USA) 10. Network Realism/Capitalist Realism (Dirk Wiemann
University of Potsdam
Germany) 11. Postcolonial Realism and Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters (Eli Park Sorensen
Chinese University of Hong Kong) 12. Settler-Colonial Realism: Naturalizing and Denaturalizing the Frontier (Hamish Dalley
Daemen College
USA) Notes on Contributors Index