This book has a double purpose: to compare the literary projects, theories, and careers of Balzac and Henry James, and to develop a theory of realism that can account for their unabashed mimetic intentions and for their novels' sophisticated textuality. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Steele brings the problem of reference into contemporary critical debates about representation. By defining realism in terms of linguistic practices instead of representational accuracy, this study liberates reference from traditional realist concerns with the empirical universe. Realism thus becomes only one kind of referential practice.

An engaging, highly accessible and informative introduction to French literature from the Middle Ages to the present.

Ever since William Dean Howells declared his "realism war" in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of "realism" and "naturalism" as the great development in American post-Civil War fiction. Yet there are many problems with this generalization. It is virtually impossible, for example, to extract from the novels and manifestoes of American writers of this period any consistent definitions of realism or naturalism as modes of literary representation. Rather than seek common traits in widely divergent "realist" and "naturalist" literary works, Michael Davitt Bell focuses here on the role that these terms played in the social and literary discourse of the 1880s and 1890s. Bell argues that in America, "realism" and "naturalism" never achieved the sort of theoretical rigor that they did in European literary debate. Instead, the function of these ideas in America was less aesthetic than ideological, promoting as "reality" a version of social normalcy based on radically anti-"literary" and heavily gendered assumptions. What effects, Bell asks, did ideas about realism and naturalism have on writers who embraced and resisted them? To answer this question, he devotes separate chapters to the work of Howells and Frank Norris (the principal American advocates of realism and naturalism in the 1880s and 1890s), Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Bell reveals that a chief function of claiming to be a realist or a naturalist was to provide assurance that one was a "real" man rather than an "effeminate" artist. Since the 1880s, Bell asserts, all serious American fiction writers have had to contend with this problematic conception of literary realism. The true story of the transformation of American fiction after the Civil War is the history of this contention - a history of individual accommodations, evasions, holding actions, and occasional triumphs.

Rowe examines James from the perspectives of the psychology of literary influence, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, literary phenomenology and impressionism, and reader-response criticism, transforming a literary monument into the telling point of intersection for modern critical theories.

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way. Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh—entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes—that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks’s Balzac’s Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.

Not since Kiss of the Spider Woman has a story about the effects of persecution on the human mind interwoven fantastic and realistic elements as effectively. A story of biting irony and bitter satire, leaning heavily on Nabokov s Pale Fire, Ghost Rider addresses contemporary social concerns with its elegant, crisp prose. The protagonist has no name and no identity. Together with her memory, they have been taken in a Latin American war. When she falls for a famous rider, she must descend into the pits of her past, to tell him her story, and is forced to add new chapters as she peels away hidden layers of herself. Initially, there seems to be nothing wrong with her, except for a strange affinity for ghosts. Her memories of fear-filled nights take her back to Peru, into the vengeful mind of an executed man. Claiming she has killed him, he tries to convince her of the advantages of being dead. To banish him, she sets music against her blood-reeking past. When she finally succeeds, she is eighty-two. But it might be a dream, like the rest of her story, or her final nightmare. Nothing rules out that she could awake in the torture chamber, facing her final hour.

Examines the life and writings of Henry James including detailed synopses of his works, explanations of literary terms, biographies of friends and family, and social and historical influences.

This comprehensive account of the writing life of Henry James aims at providing a critical overview of all his important writings, firmly set in two contexts: that of James's practical career as a novelist in America, England, and Europe; and that of the literary and intellectual climate of his time. By tracing the complex development of his career under such headings as 'American and Romantic', 'Victorian and Realist', 'Crisis and Experiment' and 'Master and Modernist', it gives a dynamic portrait, both factual and interpretative, of one of the greatest and most prolific novelists in the language, whose many-sided career began in the time of Thackeray and Dickens, and ended by ushering in the writings of Joyce and Woolf.