"Realism is one of the most common terms in the critical vocabulary, yet has been described as a 'monster with many heads desperately in need of disentangling'. Professor Furst's collection is ideally placed to help the student understand its complexities and the range of responses it has evoked. She begins with the reflections of such classic 'realist' writers as Balzac and Henry James which provide a context for a series of major twentieth-century readings. After this overture the curtain is raised with contributions from humanist, Marxist, structuralist, rhetorical, reader-oriented, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist and feminist criticism, including excerpts from an international range of critics such as George Lukacs, Roland Barthes, David Lodge and J. Hillis Miller. A substantial Introduction, Headnotes and a Glossary of Terms provide a wider context for the essays and explain terms that may be unfamiliar to the student. A selective annotated Bibliography provides a guide to further reading"--Back cover.

"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.