All is true : the claims and strategies of realist fiction / Lilian R. Furst.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Furst, Lilian R.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Criticism.

Realism in literature.

Fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (231 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1995.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

1 Truth to Tell

2 Let's Pretend ...

3 Framing the Fiction

4 Not So Long Ago

5 The Game of the Name

6 Landscapes of Consciousness

7 Figuring the Pretense

8 The Enactment of Place

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages [203]-213) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822316466

0822316463

9780822377610

0822377616

OCLC:

603865221