Realism: Aesthetics, Experiments, Politics

About the Author

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).

Product Description

Realism seems to be everywhere, both as a trending critical term and as a revitalized aesthetic practice. This volume brings together for the first time three aspects that are pertinent for a proper understanding of realism: its 19th-century aesthetics committed to making reality into an object of serious art; the experiments with and against realism by 20th-century modernist, postmodernist, or magical realist writing; and the politics of realism, especially its ambitions to map the complex realities produced by global capitalism and climate catastrophe. This juxtaposition of aesthetics, experiments, and politics unsettles the entrenched opposition between realism and experimental literature that tends to ignore the fact that realism, by virtue of its commitment to a changing material and social world, cannot be but continuously experimenting.

The innovative chapters of this book address some of the pressing questions of literary and cultural studies today, like the complex relation between historical materialism and new materialisms, between science and art, or the different aesthetic and political affordances of making systemic analyses against depicting the specificity of the local. Some of the chapters deal with classically realist authors, such as George Eliot, Émile Zola, and Joseph Conrad, to gauge the aesthetic radicalism of their diverse realist projects. Others investigate the experimental engagements with realism by authors such as B.S. Johnson, J.M. Coetzee, or Rachel Cusk. Yet others, analyze the politics of realism found in contemporary anglophone novels by writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Mitchell, or Rohinton Mistry. The readings assembled here are a testament to the diversity of literary realism(s) from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and to the ongoing controversies surrounding definitions and deployments of “realism.”

Review

“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)