Description: In The Realistic Imagination, George Levine argues that the Victorian realists and the later modernists were in fact doing similar things in their fiction: they were trying to use language to get beyond language. Levine sees the history of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel as a continuing process in which each generation of writers struggled to escape the grip of convention and attempted to create new language to express their particular sense of reality. As these attempts hardened into new conventions, they generated new attempts to break free.
Brief description: George Levine is the Kenneth Burke Professor of English and director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of sixteen books, including The Realistic Imagination and Darwin and the Novelists, both published by the University of Chicago Press, as well as Lifebirds.