For at least a century, scholarship on realist narrative, and
occasional polemics against realist narrative, have assumed that
realism promotes the values of sameness against those of otherness,
and that it does so by use of a narrative mode that excludes
certain epistemologies, ideologies, and ways of thinking. However,
the truth is more complex than that, as the essays in this volume
all demonstrate. Realism's Others examines the various strategies
by which realist narratives create the idea of difference, whether
that difference is registered in terms of class, ethnicity,
epistemology, nationality, or gender. The authors in this
collection examine in detail not just the fact of otherness in some
canonical realist and canonical magical-realist and postmodern
novels, but the actual means by which that otherness is established
by the text. These essays suggest that neither realist narrative
nor narratives positioned as anti-realist take otherness for
granted; rather, the texts discussed here actively create
difference, and this creation of difference often occasions severe
difficulties for the novels' representational schema. How does one
represent different types of knowledge, other aesthetic modes or
other spaces, for example, in texts whose epistemology has long
been seen as secular and empirical, whose aesthetic mode has always
been approached as pure descriptive mimesis, and whose settings are
largely domestic? These essays all begin with a certain
collision-of nationalities, of classes, of representational
matrices, of religions-and go on to chart the challenges that this
collision presents to our ideas or stereotypes of realism, or to
the possibilities of writing against and beyond realism. This
question motivates examination of key realist or social-realist
texts, in some of these essays, by Honore de Balzac, George Eliot,
Franz Grillparzer, Theodor Storm, Gottfried Keller, Theodor
Fontane, Wilhelm Raabe, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Henry James,
William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, H. T.
Tsiang, Alan Sillitoe, and Richard Yates. However, it is no less
central a question in certain non-realist texts which engage
realist aims to a surprising degree, often to debate them openly;
some of these essays discuss, in this light, fantastic, magical
realist, and postmodern works by Abram Tertz, Paul Auster, Alejo
Carpentier, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie,
and A. S. Byatt. Realism becomes more than an aesthetic aim or
narrative mode. It becomes, rather, a value evoked and discussed by
all of the works analyzed here, in order to reveal its impact on
fiction's treatment of ethnicity, nationality, ideology, space,
gender, and social class.
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