Adventures in 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. Notes on Contributors.

Foreword by Rachel Bowlby (University College London).

Acknowledgments.

Introduction: Reclaiming Realism: Matthew Beaumont (University College London).

1. Literary Realism Reconsidered: “The world in its length and breadth”: George Levine (Rutgers University).

2. Realist Synthesis in the Nineteenth Century Novel: “That unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness”: Simon Dentith (University of Gloucestershire).

3. Space, Mobility, and the Novel: “The spirit of place is a great reality”: Josephine McDonagh (Oxford University).

4. Naturalism: “Dirt and horror pure and simple”: Sally Ledger (Birkbeck College, University of.

London).

5. Realism before and after Photography: “The fantastical form of a relation among things”: Nancy Armstrong (Brown University).

6. The Realist Aesthetic in Painting: “Serious and committed, ironic and brutal, sincere and full of poetry”: Andrew Hemingway (University College London).

7. Interrupted Dialogues of Realism and Modernism: “The fact of new forms of life, already born and active”: Esther Leslie (Birkbeck College, University of London).

8. Socialist Realism: “To depict reality in its revolutionary development”: Brandon Taylor (University of Southampton).

9. Realism, Modernism, and Photography: “At last, at last the mask has been torn away’”: John Roberts (University of Wolverhampton).

10. Cinematic Realism: “A recreation of the world in its own image”: Laura Marcus (University of Sussex).

11. The Current of Critical Irrealism: “A moonlit enchanted night”: Michael Löwy (National Center for Scientific Research, Paris and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris).

12. Psychoanalysis and the Lacanian Real: “Strange shapes of the unwarped primal world”: Slavoj Žižek (University of Ljubljana and Birkbeck College, University of London).

13. Feminist Theory and the Return of the Real: “What we really want most out of realism …”: Helen Small (Pembroke College, Oxford).

14. Realism and Anti-Realism in Contemporary Philosophy: “What’s truth got to do with it?”: Christopher Norris (Cardiff University).

15. A Note on Literary Realism in Conclusion: Fredric Jameson (Duke University).

Index