Realism and the Novel

Realism and the Novel combines arguments about realism's emergence in the European eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with essays on its persistence throughout the world and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Moving away from a diffusionist account of culture – one where the realist novel is understood to have an autonomous national development in the West that then spreads across the globe – Realism and the Novel focuses, instead, on the ways the relationship between center and periphery informs both realism's origins and its continued relevance. At the same time, this collection takes seriously the semi-autonomy of literary form; the realist inheritance is not only an imposition. Rather, in its multiple incarnations, the realist novel has shown itself to be an exceptionally varied and multi-faceted form for representing the disparate social worlds of imperial modernity.