Realism in European Literature: Essays in Honour of J. P. Stern

by Edited by Nicholas Boyle , Martin Swales

• ISBN13: 9780521155335
• ISBN10: 0521155339
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-11-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The essays in this collection, which was originally published in 1986, address fundamental issues of literary realism that have long been given prominence by J. P. Stern, the distinguished writer on German literature and author of the seminal study On Realism. In the prevailing theoretical climate problems associated with literary realism assumed great urgency. Such problems are the notion of literary 'truth to life', the survival of the concept of 'realism' in the light of modern hermeneutical theory, the perspective adopted by the contemporaries of Barthes and inheritors of Nietzsche on the canonical prose writers of the nineteenth century, and the future for an exegetical tradition represented in the work of Erich Auerbach.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Note on the text

Notes on language, its deconstruction and on translating

Significant objects: a possibility of realism in early narratives

'Enter Mariners, wet': realism in Shakespeare's last plays

Language and reality in Bleak House

The problem of nineteenth-century German realism

Proust's Balzac

Realism, modernism, and 'language-consciousness'

Nietzche and the 'middle mode of discourse'

Fabricating histories

Ounces of example: Henry James, philosopher

Afterthoughts on realism

Index

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