Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass

Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism argues for realism as a genre committed to depicting the imperiled ecological system of soul and society. More specifically: realism, Kearns argues, suggests to its readers that social and political and economic reform are inextricably tied to spiritual well being. In the process of trying to communicate that suggestion, realism enters into a kind of considerate conversation with its readers which - through the slippage endemic to language - rapidly works to destabilise, even undermine, its own assumptions. Thus realism, in addition to bearing the burden of its own reformist agenda and the duty of character-enactment within a restricted environment, is charged with an alternative energy which can be seen at the same time to disrupt and to enrich its generic, formal bounds.

• A substantial theorising of realism • One of the first to adequately address the relationship between realism and its critics • Written for scholars as well as general readers of the texts discussed

Introduction; 1. Real realism; 2. Talking about things; 3. Domestic violence; 4. The inhuman; 5. Bronte’s variations on a theme by Sade; 6. A tropology of realism in Hard Times; 7. Zenobia in chains; 8. Dreams of sleep.