Tragic Realism and Modern Society: The Passionate Political in the Modern Novel

The author constructs a theory of the novel in the vein of the new "historicism" by drawing on the analysis of modern tragedy, as exemplified by Raymond Williams and Erich Auerbach, and using the varied insights of Mikhail Bakhtin, Northrop Frye and Rene Girard. This second edition of the book has been expanded to include a criticism of anti-mimetic responses to the Real. It also discusses passion and community as the central structures of feeling in tragic realism, tracing their origins in Stendhal, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and explaining their contemporary eclipse in Western society. Tragic realism is seen not as a function of the political unconsciousness but as the literary form of the passionate political. John Orr is the author of "Tragic Drama and Modern Society: A Sociology of Dramatic Form from 1880 to the Present" and "The Making of the Twentieth Century Novel: Joyce, Lawrence, Faulkner and Beyond".