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 Lowy (National Center for Scientific Research, Paris and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris). 12. Psychoanalysis and the Lacanian Real: "Strange shapes of the unwarped primal world": Slavoj i ek (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