Realism’s Concealed Realities

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Published: May 1, 2011
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.16871
Keywords:
realism Tolstoy Henry James reality experimentation representation
Josie Billington
University of Liverpool
Philip Davis
University of Liverpool
Abstract
Challenging hostile characterisations of realism, this article argues that nineteenth-century realist fiction achieves a double loyalty: loyal to the subject matter of ostensibly mundane reality but loyal also to how life might be in the truer reality of a world in better shape—a world often hidden distortedly within this one, confined inside people too small and compromised to help re-shape it. As a consequence, the article seeks to show that, in its hidden or apparently tiny subtleties, realism has been more radically experimental with reality than it has been given credit for. Its immanent realist metaphysic, established in place of a lost or unattainable primary reality, demanded new formal agility to reach or express the “really real” not otherwise accessible to ordinary human perception or available to characters themselves. Yet realism’s technical innovations were so undemonstratively faithful to their medium as to risk being obscured and unacknowledged within it.
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Author Biographies
Josie Billington, University of Liverpool
Josie Billington teaches in the School of English, University of Liverpool and is Research Manager for The Reader Organisation. Publications include Faithful Realism (Bucknell University Press, 2002), Eliot’s Middlemarch, Continuum Reader’s Guides Series (Continuum, 2008) and (as editor) Wives and Daughters, Volume 10 of The Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (Pickering and Chatto, 2006). She is currently writing a monograph on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s creative process (Continuum, 2011) and preparing, with Philip Davis, a volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry for a new Oxford Authors series (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Philip Davis, University of Liverpool
Philip Davis is Head of School of Arts at University of Liverpool and editor of The Reader. His publications include Memory and Writing: From Wordsworth to Lawrence (Liverpool University Press, 1983), The Experience of Reading (Routledge, 1992), The Victorians 1830-1880, new Oxford English Literature Series (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Why Victorian Literature Still Matters (Blackwell, 2008). He has edited Selected Writings of John Ruskin (Everyman, 1995), Real Voices on Reading (Macmillan, 1997) and an anthology of religious poems, All the Days of My Life (Dent, 1999). In addition he is the author of Sudden Shakespeare (Athlone and St Martin’s Press, 1996), Shakespeare Thinking (2006) and the internationally acclaimed biography Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford University Press, 2007).
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