The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction

The Persistence of Realism explores how realism's defining concerns such as sympathy, class, and social determination animate the work of Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Ralph Ellison, challenging the notion of modernism's aesthetic superiority over realism's social commitments. It shows how these writers engaged with realism in concrete ways, preserving and subverting realist structures such as the domestic novel, naturalist fiction, novels of sentiment, and industrial tales.

Format: Hardback
Length: 280 pages
Publication date: 06 October 2022
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

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.

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.

ISBN-13: 9781009223140