Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (review)

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere ‘human beasts’ who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Many readers were scandalized by an approach to character-drawing which seemed to undermine not only the moral values of a deeply conservative society, but also the whole code of psychological description on which the realist novel was based. Together with the important ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ in which Zola defended himself against charges of immorality, Thérèse Raquin stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock. This new translation is based on the second edition of 1868. The Introduction situates the novel in the context of Naturalism, medicine, and the scientific ideas of Zola's day.

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“Moralised Fables”

Good Form ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691196640.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-9

Author(s):

Jesse Rosenthal

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

George Eliot ◽

Moral Life ◽

Realist Novel ◽

Moral Thought ◽

Physical Motion ◽

Ethical Discourse ◽

New Perspective ◽

Moral Valence

This introductory chapter discusses how, over the course of the nineteenth century, an “intuitive” faith in an internalized sense of right and wrong came to take an increasingly prominent, if fraught, place in English moral life. It was “moralistic” figures like George Eliot—that is, novelists—who would provide the most lasting expression of this prominence. The compulsion of narrative, a reader's feeling of being drawn through a text, was a key term in the developing novel art of the nineteenth century. The metaphor of physical motion, which Victorians applied to the reading experience, came to offer a means of describing the movement from what is to what ought to be—or at least the yearning for that movement. At the same time, the moral valence that readers placed on the stories they read came to shape, in terms of both market forces and creative tradition, the principles that now define the well-plotted realist novel. By offering a fuller context for the ethical discourse of the British nineteenth century, this book argues that Victorian formalism was inextricably tied to moral thought. This not only impacts one's reading of Victorian literary and philosophical history but also offers a new perspective on one's own approaches to literature.

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The Novel and the Police Power

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2009.64.1.76 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 64 (1) ◽

pp. 76-107

Author(s):

Deak Nabers

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

William Dean Howells ◽

Law And Literature ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

The Novel ◽

Realist Novel ◽

Economic Practices ◽

Economic Coercion ◽

American Law ◽

Late Nineteenth

The realist novel has long been understood in terms of its representation of the diffusion of political agency into social and economic practices. This essay claims that realism, at least as it emerged in the work of late-nineteenth-century American writers such as William Dean Howells, does not record this process of diffusion so much as anatomize it, and that novels like A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) participated in a widespread and multivalent effort, in American law and literature alike, to specify the proper boundaries of the state's authority in relation other increasingly visible forms of social and economic coercion.

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‘Pictures of Domestic Life in Country Villages’

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199566747.013.025 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Jan Fergus

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Literary History ◽

Jane Austen ◽

Real Life ◽

Domestic Life ◽

Realist Novel ◽

The Real ◽

Indirect Speech ◽

Third Person ◽

Narrative Techniques

Though less popular and esteemed in her own time than better known novelists like Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, Jane Austen now occupies an exalted place in literary history, in part for inventing nineteenth-century British ‘realist’ fiction. Such fictions seem to represent ‘real life’; she found narrative techniques to give the effect of the real. One of the most important of these techniques has been called ‘free indirect speech’: loosely, a narrator’s third-person, supposedly detached voice ventriloquizes the language and thus the perspective of one of the characters. Austen’s experiments with this device, particularly in Emma, have a history; she had foremothers. Analysis of examples from Austen’s and Edgeworth’s works demonstrate that the use of free indirect speech came to Austen in part through Edgeworth’s experiments in Tales of Fashionable Life. Elaborated and extended by Austen in her novels, the device constitutes Austen’s lasting formal contribution to the realist novel.

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Hardy, Conrad and the Senses

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474449861.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Hugh Epstein

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Classical Physics ◽

Realist Novel ◽

Shared Attention ◽

Broad Field ◽

Literary Art ◽

The Senses ◽

Field View

The first book-length study of connections between these two major authors, this book reads the highly descriptive impressionist fiction of Hardy and Conrad together in the light of a shared attention to sight and sound. By proposing ‘scenic realism’ as a term to describe their affinities of epistemology and literary art, this study seeks to establish that the two novelists’ treatment of the senses in relation to the physically encompassing world creates a distinctive outward-looking pairing within the broader ‘inward turn’ of the realist novel. This ‘borderland of the senses’ was intensively investigated by a variety of nineteenth-century empiricists, and mid- and late-Victorian discussions in physics and physiology are seen to be the illuminating texts by which to gauge the acute qualities of attention shared by Hardy’s and Conrad’s fiction. In an argument that re-frames the ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ containers by which the writers have been conventionally separated, thirteen major works are analysed without flattening their differences and individuality, but within a broad ‘field-view’ of reality introduced by late-classical physics. With its focus on nature and the environment, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses displays the vivid delineations of humankind’s place in nature that are at the heart of both authors’ works.

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“Life is a tragicomedy!”: Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and the Staging of the Realist Novel

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2012.67.2.139 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 67 (2) ◽

pp. 139-176

Author(s):

Terry F. Robinson

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Maria Edgeworth ◽

The Novel ◽

Realist Novel ◽

Narrative Techniques ◽

A Performance

This essay reveals how Maria Edgeworth integrated dramatic practices into her novel Belinda (1801) as a means to generate realistic effect. In doing so, it not only challenges the notion that the theater was at odds with the novel in this period but also shows that, in a novel such as Belinda, the theater fundamentally undergirds rather than detracts from its verisimilitude. As I demonstrate through careful readings of key “dramatic” scenes in the novel, Lady Delacour's adoption of the mask of the Comic Muse acts as a metonym for the mask of the novel—namely, those narrative techniques that provide the illusion of character depth and authenticity. The essay thus documents a foundational moment in the development of the nineteenth-century novel insofar as it discloses Edgeworth's contention that any novelistic move to establish subjective interiority is as much of a performance as a theatrical one; in other words, realism is theater.

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