Matthew Beaumont 
Adventures in Realism 

Adventures in Realism offers an accessible introduction to realism as it has evolved since the 19th century. Though focused on literature and literary theory, the significance of technology and the visual arts is also addressed.

* Comprises 16 newly-commissioned essays written by a distinguished group of contributors, including Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson

* Provides the historical, cultural, intellectual, and literary contexts necessary to understand developments in realism

* Addresses the artistic mediums and technologies such as painting and film that have helped shape the way we perceive reality

* Explores literary and pictorial sub-genres, such as naturalism and socialist realism

* Includes a brief bibliography and suggestions for further reading at the end of each section

Daftar Isi

List of Illustrations.

Notes on Contributors.

Foreword by Rachel Bowlby (University College London).

Acknowledgments.

Introduction: Reclaiming Realism: Matthew Beaumont (University
College London).

1. Literary Realism Reconsidered: ‘The world in its length
and breadth’: George Levine (Rutgers University).

2. Realist Synthesis in the Nineteenth Century Novel:
‘That unity which lies in the selection of our keenest
consciousness’: Simon Dentith (University of
Gloucestershire).

3. Space, Mobility, and the Novel: ‘The spirit of place is
a great reality’: Josephine Mc Donagh (Oxford University).

4. Naturalism: ‘Dirt and horror pure and simple’:
Sally Ledger (Birkbeck College, University of.

London).

5. Realism before and after Photography: ‘The fantastical
form of a relation among things’: Nancy Armstrong (Brown
University).

6. The Realist Aesthetic in Painting: ‘Serious and
committed, ironic and brutal, sincere and full of poetry’:
Andrew Hemingway (University College London).

7. Interrupted Dialogues of Realism and Modernism: ‘The
fact of new forms of life, already born and active’: Esther
Leslie (Birkbeck College, University of London).

8. Socialist Realism: ‘To depict reality in its
revolutionary development’: Brandon Taylor (University of
Southampton).

9. Realism, Modernism, and Photography: ‘At last, at last
the mask has been torn away”: John Roberts (University
of Wolverhampton).

10. Cinematic Realism: ‘A recreation of the world in its
own image’: Laura Marcus (University of Sussex).

11. The Current of Critical Irrealism: ‘A moonlit
enchanted night’: Michael Löwy (National Center for
Scientific Research, Paris and École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales, Paris).

12. Psychoanalysis and the Lacanian Real: ‘Strange shapes
of the unwarped primal world’: Slavoj Zizek
(University of Ljubljana and Birkbeck College, University of
London).

13. Feminist Theory and the Return of the Real: ‘What we
really want most out of realism …’: Helen Small
(Pembroke College, Oxford).

14. Realism and Anti-Realism in Contemporary Philosophy:
‘What’s truth got to do with it?’: Christopher
Norris (Cardiff University).

15. A Note on Literary Realism in Conclusion: Fredric Jameson
(Duke University).

Index

Tentang Penulis

Matthew Beaumont is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English at University College, London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900 (2005), and has edited Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward for Oxford World’s Classics.