Abstract
Brown uses the introduction to situate the book within studies of nineteenth-century British literary realism, painting, photography, visual culture, and image–text relationships. He establishes that the mid-nineteenth century marked the first time critics and writers used the term ‘realism’ to describe literature or painting, and that even though we now tend to accept a ready definition of realism, its meaning was ambiguous at its inception. He argues that writers and critics came to define and understand realism by writing about painting and painters, and by defining realism and its possibilities, they established beliefs about the people who both practiced and were the subjects of realist representation in terms of race, gender, and class.
There appears a common and growing tendency…distinctly towards Realism – as the thing, less easily defined than apprehended, is now called in France. […] In England, the Praeraphaelite movement need but be named.
– William Michael Rossetti, at The International Exhibitions of Art, Paris, 1855
The title ‘realist’ has been imposed on me in the same way as the title ‘romantic’ was imposed on the men of 1830. Titles have never given the right idea of things; if they did, works would be unnecessary.
– Gustave Courbet, ‘Statement on Realism’ (1855)
The terms Real and Ideal have been so run upon of late, that their repetition begins to nauseate; but they must be kept, for all that, till better equivalents are provided.
– David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles (1859)
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Notes
- 1.
The history of scholarship on realism is, of course, long and complex. One of the strongest advocates of the term has been Georg Lukacs, who connected it with revolutionary class politics of the nineteenth century. Maligning of the term arguably reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s, when Foucauldian, Marxist, and feminist discourses connected it to the oppressive regimes of a patriarchal and capitalist state. For just a few examples, see Leo Bersani’s A Future for Astyanax (1984), Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice (2002), D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1989), and Nancy Armstrong’s How Novels Think (2005). Deconstructionist criticism, such as Ioan Williams’s The Realist Novel in England: A Study in Development (1974) also maligned it as a naïve and shallow representational practice. This sentiment persists, as in a Nation article that referred to, ‘English-language market-prose’ as ‘the one contemporary popular art form that still falls for its own naturalist swindle,’ that needs ‘occasional reminding that even, and especially, in the sparkling heights of realism, art is naught but theft and apery and con’ (Ehrenreich, 2010). Nonetheless, George Levine’s The Realist Imagination (1983) has done much to redeem realism for scholarly attention, even as his approach has also caused critics to redefine it as multiple and varied. One of the more recent such approaches is Rachel Bowlby’s foreword to Adventures in Realism (Beaumont, 2007), in which she argues that scholarly dismissal of realism means ‘to ignore the multiplicity of realisms in realism’s own primary time’ (p. xiii). At the same time, Frederick Jameson’s recent Antinomies of Realism (2013) offers an overarching definition of realism as a dialectic relationship between storytelling and affect (p. 10), applying a metaphor of a DNA strand composed of two competing threads that are ultimately incompatible and thus unravel (p. 11).
- 2.
Other works, such as Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth’s Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (1983), trace realism’s origins back farther, to the Renaissance.
- 3.
See Note 1.
- 4.
According to Bowlby, ‘the first attested use of the word is in French – realisme – in 1826’ (2007, p. xii).
- 5.
Linda Nochlin’s Realism (1971) is arguably the seminal work on realism in painting, and the closest counterpart to Watt’s work on realism in literature. She identifies similar Enlightenment underpinnings to realism as Watt does, but she definitely believes that the French Realists were more committed to the movement than the Pre-Raphaelites. See Morris (2003), particularly pages 47 and 76, for speculation as to why the genesis of realism in Britain was considerably less marked than it was in France. Also, see Rosen and Zerner, whom I will address at greater length in Chapter 2.
- 6.
Morris claims the first use of term in Britain was ‘when Frazer’s Magazine described Thackeray as “chief of the Realist School”, [which] just predates the passionate French controversy over the term “realisme” sparked off by Gustave Courbet in 1855’ (2003, p. 88).
- 7.
A quick use of Google’s Ngram Viewer to search books in English from 1800–1900 shows that usage of the term was negligible until around mid-century, after which it quickly and steadily rose.
- 8.
The introduction to Antonia Losano’s The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature (2008) provides an excellent overview of the scholarship on such ‘interart’ relationships. In addition to the works cited in this Introduction, other important works include Alison Byerly’s Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (1997), Rachel Teukolsky’s The Literate Eye (2013), and Linda Shires’s Perspectives (2009). More recently, Dehn Gilmore’s The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art (2013) very self-consciously notes that,
In recent decades, the larger investment of literary studies in historicism has produced many reflections on the overlap between the Victorians’ literature and their visual culture, and the ‘picture’ generated of this relationship has become broad of canvas indeed. In a series of linking literary and artistic worlds, scholars have shown that the two spheres shared a powerful commitment to realism, and that the novel could often work in an ekphrastic or ‘painterly’ idiom as part of its own efforts to be realistic. (p. 1)
- 9.
- 10.
Ermarth identifies consensus as realism’s most salient trait:
its touchstone being the agreement between the various viewpoints made available by a text…to the extent that they converge upon the “same” world, that text maintains the consensus of realism; to the extent that such agreement remains unsupported or becomes impossible, to that extent the realistic effect is compromised. It is not only the presence of points of view that confers verisimilitude; it is their consensus alone that homogenizes the medium of experience and thus objectifies a common world. (1983, pp. ix–x)
For more on realism, consensus, and multiple points of view, see Shires (2009).
- 11.
Jameson describes the competing, ultimately incompatible strands that comprise realism as impulses towards ‘scenic elaboration’ and ‘affective investment’ (2013, p. 11).
- 12.
For example, Sharon Marcus cites Kenneth Graham’s English Criticism of the Novel, 1865–1900 to say that ‘the moral ideal, or a specifically Christian ideal, or, most frequently, a belief in the absolute nature of the social code’ dominated Victorian aesthetics (‘Comparative Sapphism,’ 2002, p. 71).
- 13.
See Note 1.
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Brown, D. (2016). Introduction. In: Representing Realists in Victorian Literature and Criticism. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40679-4_1
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