Concise Companion to Realism

Matthew Beaumont is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English at University College, London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (2005), and has edited Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward for Oxford World’s Classics.

• List of Illustrations ix Notes on Contributors xForeword by Rachel Bowlby xivAcknowledgments xxiiIntroduction: Reclaiming Realism 1Matthew Beaumont1 Literary Realism Reconsidered: "The world in its length and breadth" 13George Levine2 Realist Synthesis in the Nineteenth Century Novel: "The unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness" 23Simon Dentith3 Space, Mobility, and the Novel: "The spirit of place is a great reality" 50Josephine McDonagh4 Fictions of the Real: "All truth with malice in it" 68Terry Eagleton5 Naturalism: "Dirt and horror pure and simple" 86Sally Ledger6 Realism before and after Photography: "The fantastical form of a relation among things" 102Nancy Armstrong7 The Realist Aesthetic in Painting: "Serious and committed, ironic and brutal, sincere and full of poetry" 121Andrew Hemingway8 Interrupted Dialogues of Realism and Modernism: "The fact of new forms of life, already born and active" 143Esther Leslie9 Socialist Realism: "To depict reality in its revolutionary development" 160Brandon Taylor10 Realism, Modernism, and Photography: "At last, at last the mask has been torn away" 176John Roberts11 Cinematic Realism: "A recreation of the world in its own image" 195Laura Marcus12 The Current of Critical Irrealism: "A moonlit enchanted night" 211Michael Lowy13 Psychoanalysis and the Lacanian Real: "Strange shapes of the unwrapped primal world" 225Slavoj Zizek14 Feminist Theory and the Return of the Real: "What we really want most out of realism…" 242Helen Small15 Realism and Anti-Realism in Contemporary Philosophy: "What's truth got to do with it?" 259Christopher NorrisAfterword: A note on literary realism 279Fredric JamesonIndex 290