The Cambridge History of Russian Literature
Title | The Cambridge History of Russian Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Charles Moser |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 724 |
Release | 1992-04-30 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780521425674 |
An updated edition of this comprehensive narrative history, first published in 1989, incorporating a new chapter on the latest developments in Russian literature and additional bibliographical information. The individual chapters are by well-known specialists, and provide chronological coverage from the medieval period on, giving particular attention to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and including extensive discussion of works written outside the Soviet Union. The book is accessible to students and non-specialists, as well as to scholars of literature, and provides a wealth of information.
Realism in the Age of Impressionism
Title | Realism in the Age of Impressionism PDF eBook |
Author | Marnin Young |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 273 |
Release | 2015-01-01 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0300208324 |
The late 1870s and early 1880s were watershed years in the history of French painting. As outgoing economic and social structures were being replaced by a capitalist, measured time, Impressionist artists sought to create works that could be perceived in an instant, capturing the sensations of rapidly transforming modern life. Yet a generation of artists pushed back against these changes, spearheading a short-lived revival of the Realist practices that had dominated at mid-century and advocating slowness in practice, subject matter, and beholding. In this illuminating book, Marnin Young looks closely at five works by Jules Bastien-Lepage, Gustave Caillebotte, Alfred-Philippe Roll, Jean-Franocois Raffaeelli, and James Ensor, artists who shared a concern with painting and temporality that is all but forgotten today, having been eclipsed by the ideals of Impressionism. Young's highly original study situates later Realism for the first time within the larger social, political, and economic framework and argues for its centrality in understanding the development of modern art.
Satire in an Age of Realism
Title | Satire in an Age of Realism PDF eBook |
Author | Aaron Matz |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | |
Release | 2010-07-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1139488317 |
As nineteenth-century realism became more and more intrepid in its pursuit of describing and depicting everyday life, it blurred irrevocably into the caustic and severe mode of literature better named satire. Realism's task of portraying the human became indistinguishable from satire's directive to castigate the human. Introducing an entirely new way of thinking about realism and the Victorian novel, Aaron Matz refers to the fusion of realism and satire as 'satirical realism': it is a mode in which our shared folly and error are so entrenched in everyday life, and so unchanging, that they need no embellishment when rendered in fiction. Focusing on the novels of Eliot, Hardy, Gissing, and Conrad, and the theater of Ibsen, Matz argues that it was the transformation of Victorian realism into satire that granted it immense moral authority, but that led ultimately to its demise.
Realism After Modernism
Title | Realism After Modernism PDF eBook |
Author | Devin Fore |
Publisher | |
Pages | 424 |
Release | 2012 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN |
The human figure made a spectacular return in visual art and literature in the 1920s. Following modernism's withdrawal, nonobjective painting gave way to realistic depictions of the body and experimental literary techniques were abandoned for novels with powerfully individuated characters. But the celebrated return of the human in the interwar years was not as straightforward as it may seem. In Realism after Modernism, Devin Fore challenges the widely accepted view that this period represented a return to traditional realist representation and its humanist postulates. Interwar realism, he argues, did not reinstate its nineteenth-century predecessor but invoked realism as a strategy of mimicry that anticipates postmodernist pastiche. Through close readings of a series of works by German artists and writers of the period, Fore investigates five artistic devices that were central to interwar realism. He analyzes Bauhaus polymath László Moholy-Nagy's use of linear perspective; three industrial novels riven by the conflict between the temporality of capital and that of labor; Brecht's socialist realist plays, which explore new dramaturgical principles for depicting a collective subject; a memoir by Carl Einstein that oscillates between recollection and self-erasure; and the idiom of physiognomy in the photomontages of John Heartfield. Fore's readings reveal that each of these "rehumanized" works in fact calls into question the very categories of the human upon which realist figuration is based. Paradoxically, even as the human seemed to make a triumphal return in the culture of the interwar period, the definition of the human and the integrity of the body were becoming more tenuous than ever before. Interwar realism did not hearken back to earlier artistic modes but posited new and unfamiliar syntaxes of aesthetic encounter, revealing the emergence of a human subject quite unlike anything that had come before.
Realism and Naturalism
Title | Realism and Naturalism PDF eBook |
Author | Richard Daniel Lehan |
Publisher | Univ of Wisconsin Press |
Pages | 358 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 9780299208745 |
In this intellectual and literary history of American, British, and Continental novels of realism and naturalism from 1850 to 1950, Richard Lehan argues that literary naturalism is a narrative mode that creates its own reality. Employing this strategy allows and encourages intertextuality - one novel talking or responding to another.
Degenerative Realism
Title | Degenerative Realism PDF eBook |
Author | Christy Wampole |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 195 |
Release | 2020-06-23 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0231546033 |
A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt. Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.
Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music
Title | Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music PDF eBook |
Author | Carl Dahlhaus |
Publisher | CUP Archive |
Pages | 152 |
Release | 1985-06-13 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 9780521261159 |
The music of the nineteenth century was - and still is - thought of as a 'romantic' art, whereas the main current of the literature and fine arts of the age was 'realist' from about 1830. Yet some works are consistently described as 'realistic': Nusorgsky's Boris and Bizet's Carmen are only the most frequently cited examples. Professor Dahlhaus sets out the criteria of realism, with particular reference to French and German theorists and examines the extent to which they apply to music too. While his findings do not reverse the verdict that the music of the age was in general romantic, he demonstrates that musical realism consists in much more than imitation of natural sounds or tone-painting. The notes are revised here for the English-speaking reader.