Contents
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The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism
Edited
and Introduction by Keith Newlin
Oxford University Press,
2019.
ISBN:
9780190642891
ABOUT
THE BOOK
The scholarship devoted to American literary realism has
long wrestled with problems of definition: is realism a genre, with a
particular form, content, and technique? Is it a style, with a
distinctive artistic arrangement of words, characters, and description?
Or is it a period, usually placed as occurring after the Civil War and
concluding somewhere around the onset of World War I? This volume aims
to widen the scope of study beyond mere definition, however, by
expanding the boundaries of the subject through essays that reconsider
and enlarge upon such questions.
The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism aims to take
stock of the scholarly work in the area and map out paths for future
directions of study. The Handbook offers 35 vibrant and original essays
of new interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of
representing life. It is the first book to treat the subject topically
and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent
scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative
and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts
that shaped their work. Contributors here tease out the workings of a
particular concept through a variety of authors and their cultural
contexts. A set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection
to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness
of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic
representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine,
the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection
to other arts--poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and
film--and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism. As a whole,
this volume forges exciting new paths in the study of realism and
writers' unending labor to represent life accurately.
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