"Adventures in Realism is an exciting and necessary book. It collects together a stunning array of essays that, both individually and as a whole, show why we need to consider the nature and importance of realism. The volume encourages us to think through the concept both in relation to its mid-nineteenth century origins, and today’s philosophical discussions; to see it both as manifested in specific literary or artistic forms and as a more abstract way of figuring our place within the material world. Matthew Beaumont should be congratulated in placing his contributors into such effective dialogue with one another: in doing so, he has returned realism to the center of historical, aesthetic, and political debate."
Kate Flint, Rutgers University
"Every new generation of critics and scholars must come to terms in its own ways with the paradoxes of realism. Realism is a period style, but at the same time it is a perennial motive in literature, art, film, and other media. Realism purports to represent things as they are, or were, but at the same time it is a constitutive set of conventions that tells people in a given time and place what is to be taken as real. This distinguished collection of essays brilliantly articulates these paradoxes for our own time."
J.Hillis Miller, University of California at Irvine
"What a wonderfully wide and deep and pushing inspection of realisms (and irrealisms) in history, in theory, in practice. Here’s realism, then and now, cannily philosophized, politicized, feminized, psychologized. Here are so many of realism’s practitioners, its aesthetic friends and enemies, the missionaries and also the scoffers, being heard and watched as they engage with their chosen media – novels, plays, paintings, photographs, films, buildings. It is, I think, as serious, engaging, educating a look at the large realist project as could well be assembled."
Valentine Cunningham, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
“Beaumont's introduction, 'Reclaiming Realism,' pinpoints the purpose of this collection. Realism fell victim to postmodern discourse; Beaumont and his fellow contributors wish to restore it.”
Choice
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.
