Title: Crises of realism : representing experience in the British novel, 1816-1910 /
Authors: Lloyd, Tom, 1952-
Publisher: Bucknell University Press ; Associated University Presses,
Year: 1997
Subjects: English fiction History and criticism; English fiction History and criticism; Realism in literature.
Abstract: Crises of Realism explores the vital "middle spaces" in novels of the Romantic and Victorian periods, when writers struggled to create realistic fictions at the intersections of experience and aesthetic organizing tropes. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, Hayden White, and George Levine, Lloyd stresses the growing instability of literary representation and the accompanying tendency among novelists to find narrative escapes, however brief. The book's thesis is that novelistic realism is, in part, an endeavor to tame the instabilities unleashed by revolution and doubt; yet realism must display its unstable origins if it is to be valid. Therein lies the difficulty of creating middle spaces where instability is both tamed and revealed.
Contents: 1. Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France -- 2. Jane Austen's Emma: Realism and Delimitation -- 3. Frankenstein and Aesthetic Decay -- 4. Jane Eyre: Vision and Aesthetic Control -- 5. Aesthetic Escapes in Four Novels by Charles Dickens -- 6. George Eliot's Visions: Idealism and Realism -- 7. Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Realism as a Form of Idealism -- 8. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Monstrous Portrait and Realism's Demise -- 9. Symbols, Ornaments, and Things in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness -- 10. E.M. Forster and Artistic Fluidity: Romance, Idyll, and Limited Metaphors.