Reconciliations with reality

Description

This is a study of the affect and psychology of nineteenth-century literary realism, primarily in Britain but with reference to a wider European context. By looking at epiphanic moments of realism in Wordsworth, Dickens, Henry James, and Joyce, it argues that realism can constitute a distinct aesthetic experience, a "discovery of reality" won against mental positions that normally preclude it. In this view, realism is defined not so much by the nature of its contents as by the form of blindness it must overcome--whether it be indifference, contempt, boredom, idealization, fantasy, or a preestablished aesthetic category--as well as by an ensuing affective response that can range from disillusion and anger to equanimity, amusement, interest, pity, gratitude, pleasure, wonder, and joy. Chapter one presents a general argument for realism as an artistic capacity grounded on affective rather than epistemological or rhetorical grounds: the question is not whether objectivity is possible or how a text produces the linguistic illusion of veracity, but how a writer comes to apprehend certain aspects of reality that previously had seemed too commonplace for literature. Each succeeding chapter traces the growth of a realist sensibility in a particular writer. Chapter two looks at Wordsworth's Prelude and its accounts of how the mind comes to experience an interest in objects it had either failed to notice or actively dismissed--including the self. Subsequent chapters move to works of fiction, where the possibility of a realist sensibility must be won primarily against narrative rather than lyrical criteria of interest. Chapter three argues that many of the dramatic incidents in Great Expectations can justly be read as hallucinatory fulfillments of Pip's desire for a different life, and that by finally being "cured" of his expectations Pip acknowledges a reality he had tried to disown. Chapter four reads The Ambassadors (1900) against The American (1875), as part of a larger reevaluation of the concept of experience in the late work of Henry James. The final chapter traces the changing affect of realism in the writings of James Joyce, from the pain and anger that pervade Dubliners, to the pathos of The Dead and parts of Portrait of the Artist, to the joyousness and magnanimity that appear in Ulysses through the consciousness of Bloom--a gradual change of heart reflected stylistically in the evolution from the "scrupulous meanness" of Dubliners to the experimental exuberance of Ulysses.

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