The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction

Demonstrates the persistence of realism's characteristic concerns – sympathy, melodrama, gender and class – in the most aesthetically innovative works of modernist fiction.

Paul Stasi (Author)

9781009223140, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 October 2022

280 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

Form vs. content, aesthetics vs. politics, modernism vs. realism: these entrenched binaries tend to structure work in early 20th century literary studies even among scholars who seek to undo them. The Persistence of Realism demonstrates how realism's defining concerns – sympathy, class, social determination – animate the work of Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Ralph Ellison. In contrast to the oft-told tale of an aesthetically rich modernism overthrowing realism's social commitments along with its formal structures, Stasi shows how these writers engaged with realism in concrete ways. The domestic novel, naturalist fiction, novels of sentiment, and industrial tales are realist structures that modernist fiction simultaneously preserves and subverts. Putting modernist writers in conversation with the realism that preceded them, The Persistence of Realism demonstrates how modernism's social concerns are inseparable from its formal ones.

1. Fables of autonomy in Late James
2. 'She will drown me with her': sympathy and autonomy in Joyce's Ulysses
3. 'Innumberable slight changes': historical time and social reproduction in The Years
4. 'I was always sentimental': Beckett's scenes of sympathy
5. 'He forgot his history': Ellison's Naturalist Modernism.

Subject Areas: Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Social classes [JFSC], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]