Description: "This volume brings together for the first time three aspects that are pertinent for a proper understanding of realism: its origins as a radical 19th-century aesthetic practice of making reality into an object of serious art; the challenges to it taken up in 20th-century literature; and the politics of contemporary realism. Innovative chapters deal with classically realist authors (George Eliot, âEmile Zola), experimental engagements with realism (J.M. Coetzee, Rachel Cusk) and contemporary global novels (Chimamanda Adichie, David Mitchell). The readings assembled here are a testament to the ongoing controversies surrounding definitions and deployments of the genre"--
Brief description: Jens Elze is Assistant Professor of English at Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany. He is author of Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel: Literatures of Precarity (2017) and editor of Das Enigma des Pikaresken / The Enigma of the Picaresque(2018).
Review Quotes:
"Literary realism has never looked more exciting than now, thanks to timely and ambitious volumes such as this one. The collection ranges across multiple national and historical contexts to offer a substantial reassessment of the realist mode. Written with acuity and flair, the chapters in this book demonstrate that realism was more supple, experimental, and expansive than critics have tended to assume." --Benjamin Kohlmann, Professor of English Literature, University of Regensburg, Germany, and author of British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States (2021)
"Realism: Aesthetics, Experiments, Politics is an exciting addition to the recent scholarship on the aesthetic, political, and theoretical possibilities of realist writing. Following a clear and engaging introduction, the chapters cover a broad historical and geographical range and offer new insights on realism's relationship to modernism, postmodernism, magical realism, postcoloniality, global literature, climate fiction, experimental fiction, and more. In all, the book charts an exciting course for realist studies in the new millennium." --Ulka Anjaria, Professor of English, Brandeis University, USA, and author of Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (2012) "Realism: Aesthetics, Experiments, Politics persuades us of the renewed energy and innovation in the plurality of realism. Casting realism as an aesthetic and political strategy, the book is broad in scope and the essays reinforce the capacity for foundational and contemporary realism to be both experimental and relevant." --Maggie Bowers, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Portsmouth, UK, and author of Magic(al) Realism: The New Critical Idiom (2004)