The real represents to my perception the things that we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another', wrote Henry James in 1907. This description, riven with double negatives, hesitation, and uncertainty, encapsulates the epistemological difficulties of realism, for underlying its narrative and descriptive apparatus as an aesthetic mode lies a philosophical quandary. What grounds the 'real' of the realist novel? What kind of perception is required to validate the experience of reality? How does the realist novel represent the difficulty of knowing? What comes to the fore in James's account, as in so many, is how the forms of realism are constituted by a relation to unknowing, absence, and ineffability. Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel recovers a neglected literary history centred on the intricate relationship between fictional representation and philosophical commitment. It asks how—or if—we can conceptualize realist novels when the objects of their representational intentions are realities that might exist beyond what is empirically verifiable by sense data or analytically verifiable by logic, and are thus irreducible to conceptual schemes or linguistic practices—a formulation Charlotte Jones refers to as 'synthetic realism'. In new readings of Edwardian novels including Conrad's Nostromo and The Secret Agent, Wells's Tono-Bungay, and Ford's The Good Soldier, this volume revises and reconsiders key elements of realist novel theory—metaphor and metonymy; character interiority; the insignificant detail; omniscient narration and free indirect discourse; causal linearity—to uncover the representational strategies by which realist writers grapple with the recalcitrance of reality as a referential anchor, and seek to give form to the force, opacity, and uncertain scope of realities that may lie beyond the material. In restoring a metaphysical dimension to the realist novel's imaginary, Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel offers a new conceptualization of realism both within early twentieth-century literary culture and as a transhistorical mode of representation.

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.”

What grounds the fictional world of a novel? Or is such a world peculiarly groundless? In a powerful engagement with the latest debates in novel theory, Daniel Wright investigates how novelists reckon with the ontological status of their works. Philosophers who debate whether fictional worlds exist take the novel as an ontological problem to be solved; instead, Wright reveals the novel as a genre of immanent ontological critique. Wright argues that the novel imagines its own metaphysical "grounds" through figuration, understanding fictional being as self-sufficient, cohesive, and alive, rather than as beholden to the actual world as an existential anchor. Through philosophically attuned close readings of novels and reflections on writerly craft by Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Colson Whitehead, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Henry James, and Akwaeke Emezi, Wright shares an impassioned vision of reading as stepping into ontologically terraformed worlds, and of literary criticism as treading and re-treading the novel's grounds.

Essays considering the representation and perception of hell in a variety of texts.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Britain's imperial power and influence was at its height. These were years of daring, when adventurers sounded the mysteries of the deep sea and the distant poles, aviators sped through the skies, and new media technologies transformed communication. They were years of social upheaval, during which long-suppressed voices – particularly those of women, of the labouring classes, and of colonial subjects – grew louder and demanded to be heard. They were years of violence, of insurrection and political agitation, and of imperial conflicts that would encompass continents. By subjecting specific developments in literature and related culture to a fine-grained and historically-informed analysis, British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age? explores the writing of this extraordinary period in all its complexity and vibrancy.

With the rise of women's suffrage, challenges to marriage and divorce laws, and expanding opportunities for education and employment for women, the early years of the twentieth century were a time of social revolution. Examining British novels written in 1890-1914, Jane Eldridge Miller demonstrates how these social, legal, and economic changes rendered the traditional narratives of romantic desire and marital closure inadequate, forcing Edwardian novelists to counter the limitations and ideological implications of those narratives with innovative strategies. The original and provocative novels that resulted depict the experiences of modern women with unprecedented variety, specificity, and frankness. Rebel Women is a major re-evaluation of Edwardian fiction and a significant contribution to literary history and criticism. "Miller's is the best account we have, not only of Edwardian women novelists, but of early 20th-century women novelists; the measure of her achievement is that the distinction no longer seems workable." —David Trotter, The London Review of Books

Levay analyzes representations of the criminal in British and American modernism from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s.