Dougal McNeill teaches postcolonial literature and science fiction in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has published on Scottish literature, Marxist theory and literary imaginings of Japan, and is the author of The Many Lives of Galileo (2005).

«This boldly original book argues that realism has been the missing element in the post-globalisation revival of Marxism. McNeill sets out both to defend the desirability and chart the development of a truly contemporary realism, as he finds it in novels drawn from England, Scotland, Germany and New Zealand. This new realism will be emergent and oppositional, in Raymond Williams’s terms, rather than dominant. And, unlike earlier Lukácsian theories, this new realist aesthetic will decline to polemicise against other genres, preferring to form a «readerly united front» against the reifications of globalisation, alongside the future-investigations of cyberpunk and science fiction and the ideological interrogations of metafiction. This truly remarkable book promises to conjoin ontologies of the present and forecasts of the past to Jameson’s archaeologies of the future.» (Professor Andrew Milner, Monash University, Melbourne)«[...] a stimulating and confident declaration of the validity of the realist novel in the age of neoliberalism, and of the continuing relevance of Marxist literary scholarship.» (Elinor Taylor, Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 11, 2013)

• Contents: Preface: Whatever Happened to Realism? – Introduction: Only Connect? Globalisation and the Problem of Realism – Methodological Problems of the Strike Novel: The Case of GB84 57 – ‘Edging Back into Awareness’: Realisms of the Globalised City 89 – Regeneration: The Historical Novel After Postmodernism – Maurice Gee’s Marginal Realism – Conclusion: Realism in the Valley of Its Saying.

Dougal McNeill teaches postcolonial literature and science fiction in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has published on Scottish literature, Marxist theory and literary imaginings of Japan, and is the author of The Many Lives of Galileo (2005).

«This boldly original book argues that realism has been the missing element in the post-globalisation revival of Marxism. McNeill sets out both to defend the desirability and chart the development of a truly contemporary realism, as he finds it in novels drawn from England, Scotland, Germany and New Zealand. This new realism will be emergent and oppositional, in Raymond Williams’s terms, rather than dominant. And, unlike earlier Lukácsian theories, this new realist aesthetic will decline to polemicise against other genres, preferring to form a «readerly united front» against the reifications of globalisation, alongside the future-investigations of cyberpunk and science fiction and the ideological interrogations of metafiction. This truly remarkable book promises to conjoin ontologies of the present and forecasts of the past to Jameson’s archaeologies of the future.» (Professor Andrew Milner, Monash University, Melbourne)«[...] a stimulating and confident declaration of the validity of the realist novel in the age of neoliberalism, and of the continuing relevance of Marxist literary scholarship.» (Elinor Taylor, Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 11, 2013)

• Contents: Preface: Whatever Happened to Realism? – Introduction: Only Connect? Globalisation and the Problem of Realism – Methodological Problems of the Strike Novel: The Case of GB84 57 – ‘Edging Back into Awareness’: Realisms of the Globalised City 89 – Regeneration: The Historical Novel After Postmodernism – Maurice Gee’s Marginal Realism – Conclusion: Realism in the Valley of Its Saying.

Dougal McNeill teaches postcolonial literature and science fiction in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has published on Scottish literature, Marxist theory and literary imaginings of Japan, and is the author of The Many Lives of Galileo (2005).

«This boldly original book argues that realism has been the missing element in the post-globalisation revival of Marxism. McNeill sets out both to defend the desirability and chart the development of a truly contemporary realism, as he finds it in novels drawn from England, Scotland, Germany and New Zealand. This new realism will be emergent and oppositional, in Raymond Williams’s terms, rather than dominant. And, unlike earlier Lukácsian theories, this new realist aesthetic will decline to polemicise against other genres, preferring to form a «readerly united front» against the reifications of globalisation, alongside the future-investigations of cyberpunk and science fiction and the ideological interrogations of metafiction. This truly remarkable book promises to conjoin ontologies of the present and forecasts of the past to Jameson’s archaeologies of the future.» (Professor Andrew Milner, Monash University, Melbourne)«[...] a stimulating and confident declaration of the validity of the realist novel in the age of neoliberalism, and of the continuing relevance of Marxist literary scholarship.» (Elinor Taylor, Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 11, 2013)

• Contents: Preface: Whatever Happened to Realism? – Introduction: Only Connect? Globalisation and the Problem of Realism – Methodological Problems of the Strike Novel: The Case of GB84 57 – ‘Edging Back into Awareness’: Realisms of the Globalised City 89 – Regeneration: The Historical Novel After Postmodernism – Maurice Gee’s Marginal Realism – Conclusion: Realism in the Valley of Its Saying.