The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism

About the Author

Mary Holland is Professor of English at The State University of New York at New Paltz, USA. She is the author of The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Succeeding Postmodernism (Bloomsbury, 2013) and co-editor, with Stephen J. Burn, of Approaches to Teaching David Foster Wallace (2019).

Product Description

Literature has never looked weirder--full of images, colors, gadgets, and footnotes, and violating established norms of character, plot, and narrative structure. Yet over the last 30 years, critics have coined more than 20 new “realisms” in their attempts to describe it.

What makes this decidedly unorthodox literature “realistic”? And if it is, then what does “realism” mean anymore?

Examining literature by dozens of writers, and over a century of theory and criticism about realism, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism sorts through the current critical confusion to illustrate how our ideas about what is real and how best to depict it have changed dramatically, especially in recent years. Along the way, Mary K. Holland guides the reader on a lively tour through the landscape of contemporary literary studies--taking in metafiction, ideology, posthumanism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism--with forays into quantum mechanics, new materialism, and Buddhism as well, to give us entirely new ways of viewing how humans use language to make sense of--and to make--the world.

Review

“Holland [takes on] the endlessly vexed notion of realism by offering a framework for understanding it beyond the contentious and irresolvable debates about what it means to refer to certain writing as realistic … Moral Worlds’s most significant insight: language, the sole, imperfect system of accessing and representing reality, does not inhibit our ability to engage with the world but, rather, precisely because of its limitations, parallels the human experience of limited sensory perception.” - Twentieth-Century Literature

“Imagine a novel as an object in the world: not the imaginative dream that readers are normally invited to get lost in, but a novel with a body that has to be confronted. As Mary Holland argues, contemporary understandings of the world, and the Material Turn in philosophical concepts of the human and of nature, have also energized the 21st century novel--a conceptual pivot as fundamental as the turn to psychology or language during the modern or postmodern periods. Cultural sea changes so profound that they drive a rethinking of all the arts occur only once or twice in a generation: The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism is an exciting, field-changing analysis of how today, the new-material novel revitalizes print through its entanglement with readers and the stuff of the world--and the consequences wrought by these new realisms.” ―Steve Tomasula, Professor of English, University of Notre Dame, USA, and author of VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) and The Book of Portraiture (2006)

“The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism radically and fruitfully upends all the critical truisms about realism(s), bringing both sanity and clarity to central literary and literary historical periodizing debates. By bringing together all the relevant theory, astute, insightful criticism, and, most significantly, innovative literary practice, it blows open all totalizing models of language/narrative/'real' world relations to theorize the fiction written in our twenty-first century 'reality.' This is an acutely analytic, intellectually generous, meticulously researched book that puts metafiction in its (real) place.” ―Linda Hutcheon, University Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Toronto, Canada, and author of Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1980)

“What is the realism that comes after postmodernism? Many critics of contemporary fiction have sought to answer this question, but none has had Mary Holland's encyclopedic mastery of the materials necessary to do so in