Realist Vision

Description

Realist Vision explores the claim to represent the world “as it is.” Peter Brooks takes a new look at the realist tradition and its intense interest in the visual. Discussing major English and French novels and paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brooks provides a lively and perceptive view of the realist project. Centering each chapter on a single novel or group of paintings, Brooks examines the “invention” of realism beginning with Balzac and Dickens, its apogee in the work of such as Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola, and its continuing force in James and modernists such as Woolf. He considers also the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud, and such recent phenomena as “photorealism” and “reality TV.” Contents Preface Chapter 1. Realism and Representation Chapter 2. Balzac Invents the Nineteenth Century Chapter 3. Dickens and Nonrepresentation Chapter 4. Flaubert and the Scandal of Realism Chapter 5. Courbet’s House of Realism Chapter 6. George Eliot’s Delicate Vessels Chapter 7. Zola’s Combustion Chamber Chapter 8. Unreal City: Paris and London in Balzac, Zola, and Gissing Chapter 9. Manet, Caillebotte, and Modern Life Chapter 10. Henry James’s Turn of the Novel Chapter 11. Modernism and Realism: Joyce, Proust,Woolf Chapter 12. The Future of Reality? References and Bibliographical Notes Acknowledgments Index