Narrating Reality

by Shaw, Harry E.

• ISBN13: 9780801436727
• ISBN10: 0801436729
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-10-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

Narrating Reality offers a provocative and original critique of nineteenth-century British realist fiction and our ways of understanding it. Paying close attention to the role of the narrator, Harry E. Shaw challenges the denigration of realism that has become a critical orthodoxy in recent decades.

Drawing on such thinkers as Erich Auerbach, Jurgen Habermas, and J. L Austin, Shaw contends that realist novels claim not to replicate the world in their pages or to offer transparent access to it, but to involve readers in a process of narrative understanding adequate to grasping the complexities of life in history. Seen in this light, the works of such novelists as Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and George Eliot, as they depict their own and other cultures and strive to imagine regions of freedom in the dense and constricting web of history, gain a new interest.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Realism and Its Problems	1	(37)
Realism and Things	38	(52)
An Approach to Realist Narratives	90	(36)
Austen: Narrative, Plots, Distinctions, and Life in the Grain	126	(42)
Scott: Realism and the Other	168	(50)
Eliot: Narrating in History	218	(47)
Afterword	265	(4)
Appendix: On Tropes and Master Tropes	269	(8)
Index	277