The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction

Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-009-22314-0
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 280 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 552 g

Form vs. content, aesthetics vs. politics, modernism vs. realism: these entrenched binaries tend to structure work in early 20th century literary studies even among scholars who seek to undo them. The Persistence of Realism demonstrates how realism's defining concerns – sympathy, class, social determination – animate the work of Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Ralph Ellison. In contrast to the oft-told tale of an aesthetically rich modernism overthrowing realism's social commitments along with its formal structures, Stasi shows how these writers engaged with realism in concrete ways. The domestic novel, naturalist fiction, novels of sentiment, and industrial tales are realist structures that modernist fiction simultaneously preserves and subverts. Putting modernist writers in conversation with the realism that preceded them, The Persistence of Realism demonstrates how modernism's social concerns are inseparable from its formal ones.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Stasi, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Soziale Gruppen & Klassen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Fables of autonomy in Late James; 2. 'She will drown me with her': sympathy and autonomy in Joyce's Ulysses; 3. 'Innumberable slight changes': historical time and social reproduction in The Years; 4. 'I was always sentimental': Beckett's scenes of sympathy; 5. 'He forgot his history': Ellison's Naturalist Modernism.

Über Autor(innen)

Stasi, Paul
Paul Stasi is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Albany. He is the author of Modernism, Imperialism and the Historical Sense (2012), the editor of Raymond Williams at 100 (2021), co-editor of The Last Western:  Deadwood and the End of American Empire (2013) and Ezra Pound in the Present (2016), along with numerous essays.