Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Realist Novels

The introduction offers a new understanding of the politics of institutions and a new transnational account of British realism. The introduction suggests that nineteenth-century British realist novels express the tensions between shared institutional time and unruly anachronisms. In realist novels, especially realist novels in colonial settings, representing how characters inhabit institutions means encountering alternative temporalities and envisioning otherwise possibilities. This introduction makes the case for the importance of nineteenth-century Irish realist novels not only because they exemplify the temporal and political contradictions that define realism but also because their prevalent anachronisms insist that institutional time is not neutral or merely disciplinary: it structures empire.

Couleurs à la mode. Impressionism as an Effect of the Chemical Industry

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-184
Author(s):  
Wolf Kittler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Direct Effect ◽  
Chemical Industry ◽  
Synthetic Dyes ◽  
Modern City ◽  
Fashion Magazines ◽  
Realist Novels

"Die Erfindung von Anilin und anderen synthetischen Farbstoffen in der zweiten Hälfte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts ist der Beginn einer neuen Epoche. Die von der noch jungen chemischen Industrie produzierten neuen Farben sind nicht nur leuchtender als die meisten der traditionellen Farbstoffe, sondern auch viel billiger. Sie verändern das Aussehen von Frauen auf den Straßen der modernen Stadt. Unter den ersten Medien, die diese Revolution bemerken und dokumentieren, sind Modezeitschriften, realistische Romane und impressionistische Gemälde. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass die strahlenden Farben der neuen Palette der impressionistischen Maler ein direkter Effekt der chemischen Industrie sind. </br></br>The invention of aniline and other synthetic dyes in the second half of the nineteenth century is the beginning of a new epoch. The new colors produced by the fledgling chemical industry are not only brighter than most of the traditional dyestuffs, but also much cheaper. They change the appearance of women on the streets of the modern city. Among the first media to notice and document this revolution are fashion magazines, realist novels, and Impressionist paintings. I argue that the bright colors on the new palette of Impressionist painters are a direct effect of the chemical industry. "

The Lighting Design of Hardy's Novels

2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-75
Author(s):  
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Lighting Design ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
The City ◽  
Jude The Obscure

This essay argues that the phenomenology of light in Thomas Hardy's novels affords a key to his representation of subjectivity. The lighting of most scenes in nineteenth-century fiction is never specified. But from the spectacular lighting effects of Hardy's early sensation novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), to the futile quest for the "City of Light" in Jude the Obscure (1895) and the burned-out pyrotechnics of his last narrative, The Well-Beloved (1897), the light of Hardy's fiction is marked in a double sense——both described in detail and registered as exceptional. Rather than a figure for enlightenment, as in the realist novels of George Eliot and others, Hardy's light is the medium of subjectivity, and it characteristically occludes and distorts as much as it illuminates. Like the painter J.M.W. Turner, whose art the novelist excitedly recognized as an analogue of his own, Hardy represents light not as an absence to be looked through but as something to be looked at and closely observed in all its varieties.

scholarly journals Drill, Baby, Drill: Extraction Ecologies, Open Temporalities, and Reproductive Futurity in the Provincial Realist Novel

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-56
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Industrial System ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Temporal Structures

The temporal structures of provincial realist novels set in extraction landscapes convey the new understanding of futurity that attended the nineteenth-century rise of an industrial system powered by a nonrenewable, diminishing stock of underground resources. Focusing on Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Fanny Mayne's Jane Rutherford; Or, the Miners' Strike (1853), this article demonstrates how these works adapt the provincial realist novel's emphasis on social renewal by way of marriage, reproduction, and inheritance to the extraction-based society of industrial Britain, undergirded by a trajectory of depletion and exhaustion rather than renewal. These works' deviation from novelistic chrononormativity expresses a new understanding of an extraction-based present that is claimed at the expense of future generations.

Coda: Inhabiting Institutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 211-215
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The University

The coda clarifies the political stakes of this book’s argument. Reflecting on the gap between people’s lived experiences of the university and public defenses of it, it argues that nineteenth-century realist novels provide strategies for inhabiting the twenty-first century university. We, too, can find political inspiration in anachronisms. The coda shows that postcolonial and queer theory’s untimely presence in the academy resist the impulse to define the future as merely an extension of the present.

scholarly journals “There is no first reading”: (Re-)Reading Nineteenth-Century Realist Novels and their Critics

2011 ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Dennis Walder
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Common View ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Cultural Myths ◽  
Single Reading ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
The Common

We all read with the knowledge, or at least the memory, of what we have already read. And even the novels we read are imbued with their predecessors to such an extent that reading a novel means in effect reading its predecessors as well. I take a contemporary novel, Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and look at how it echoes earlier novels in the realist tradition to make the point that such novels are written with other novels in mind. As Roland Barthes put it, “there is no first reading.” According to Barthes, the common view that there is some pristine first reading of a book is as fictional as other popular cultural myths. The idea of a first, or single, reading is a pretence fostered by “the commercial and ideological habits of our society.” Every reading, even a so-called “first reading” is to some extent conditioned by other reading. Using Edward Said’s Beginnings, I look at how this is to some extent also true of critics of realist fiction, who echo and complicate each other's readings.

Novel Institutions

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
Shared Time

Novel Institutions rethinks the politics of institutions by reinterpreting the most institutional of literary forms: nineteenth-century British realism. Although realist novels, like institutions, mediate social life through a set of formal conventions and informal expectations, they also offer strategies for more capacious political imagining through their prevalent anachronisms. These anachronisms—untimely chronologies, obsolete practices, and out-of-date characters—unsettle the shared time of institutions and the consensus it fosters. Paying unprecedented attention to Irish novels, this book argues that the movement between shared institutional time and anachronisms is more pronounced in realist novels from Ireland, where Britain relied on a dual logic of institutional assimilation and exclusion. But such movement does not mean Irish novels are anomalous: these novels make the tension between the shared time of institutions and the unruly politics of anachronism visible in English realist novels. The book concludes that we cannot escape institutions, but we can refuse the narrow political future that they work to secure.

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