The English Realist Novel | April Alliston (essay date 1995)
April Alliston (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: "Female Sexuality and the Referent of Enlightenment Realisms," in Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre, edited by Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast, Cultural Politics, No. 10, University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp. 11-27.
[In the following essay, Alliston argues that there were several distinct types of realism at work in the early novel.]
Twentieth-century historians of the novel generally distinguish the emerging genre from earlier (romance) narrative by its increased "realism," variously defined in terms of referentiality to the details of a quotidian experience shared by readers.' Judged by this standard, theorized as it is from the practice of nineteenth-century high realism, most eighteenth-century novels tend to appear underdeveloped, still uncomfortably close to the romance genre satirized in one of the first novels, Don Quixote (itself, of course, hardly "high...
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