Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
All Is True : The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction, Paperback / softback Book

All Is True : The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

"All is true," realist writers would say of their work, to which critics now respond: All is art and artifice.

Offering a new approach to reading nineteenth-century realist fiction, Lilian R.

Furst seeks to reconcile these contradictory claims.

In doing so, she clarifies the deceptions, appropriations, intentions, and ultimately the power of literary realism. In close textual analyses of works ranging across European and American literature, including paradigmatic texts by Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Thomas Mann, Furst shows how the handling of time, the presentation of place, and certain narrational strategies have served the realists’ claim.

She demonstrates how readers today, like those a hundred years ago, are convinced of the authenticity of the created illusion by such means as framing, voice, perspective, and the slippage from metonymy to metaphor.

Further, Furst reveals the pains the realists took to conceal these devices, and thus to protect their claim to be employing a simple form.

Taking into account both the claims and the covert strategies of these writers, All Is True puts forward an alternative to the conventional polarized reading of the realist text—which emerges here as neither strictly an imitation of an extraneous model nor simply a web of words but a brilliantly complex imbrication of the two. A major statement on one of the most enduring forms in cultural history, this book promises to alter not only our view of realist fiction but our understanding of how we read it.

Information

Other Formats

Save 7%

£22.99

£21.25

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information