Genre in Socialist Realism

Slavic Review ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 992-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Carleton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
Century Literature

Of all the things socialist realism has been compared with, perhaps the least pejorative is its characterization as a kind of twentieth-century incarnation of neoclassicism. That is to say, socialist realism can be seen as a system based on clearly defined and delimited genres, and these genres exist in a strict hierarchy. Eighteenth-century literature certainly provides a comfortable metaphor because it invokes a picture of restraint, stasis, clarity and rigidity, in other words, those modifiers that so often characterize the monologic tendency of socialist realism.

What Was Neo-Classicism?

1969 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
James William Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Vast Range ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
Selection Of

There seems to be no doubt about it: the century-old truisms about the literature variously called “Augustan” and “Neo-Classical” are in the process of dissolution. Premises induced by J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold, explored by Oliver Elton, dogmatized by G. E. B. Saintsbury, and summarized by Leslie Stephen now appear inadequate to more recent scholars, whose research and rereading of Neo-Classical texts run counter to the general testimony as well as the specific judgments of their grandfathers. For the past few decades at least, published commentary has increasingly indicated the need to overhaul received ideas about those writers identified with the revival of classicism in England following the Restoration of Charles II and continuing throughout the eighteenth century.The deficiencies in Victorian and Edwardian assumptions about Neo-Classicism revealed by latter-day findings are several, some of them due to false criteria of taste, morality, and literary excellence. But chiefly the research of the present age has disclosed a vast range of literature simply ignored — or, perhaps, suppressed — by earlier critics. Based as they were on a limited, prejudged selection of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, the premises inherited from Victorian criticism have naturally failed to account for the discoveries of twentieth-century scholars.The resulting disparity between limited assumptions and expanded information has called into question the very possibility of formulating any critical schema that accurately describes the characteristics of English literature between 1660 and 1800. The relativistic — not to say atomistic — inclinations of contemporary scholarship enforce the view that indeed no schema is possible.

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