The House of Fiction: Literary Realism

This subject introduces students to the multifaceted, dynamic and changing genre of domestic realist fiction, from the early nineteenth-century country-house novel to recent forms such as the graphic novel and the contemporary global novel of immigrant and cosmopolitan life. Reading eight novels alongside theory of the novel that emerged with its practice, the subject asks: how has the genre been transformed within the fictions themselves and through this theory and critical reception? Traditionally associated with the eighteenth-century “rise” of the novel that consecrated the bourgeois marriage plot and the “omniscient” narrator, realist fiction has been re-energized through queer re-imaginings of intimacy and the family; critical questioning of realism’s long association with objectivity and reportage; and a new attunement to realism’s artfulness, non-narrative features, affective textures, ironic and satirical energies, and intertextual allusiveness. Key topics include: the family romance and its drama of insiders and outsiders; courtship, marriage and property plots; realism’s conjunction of psychological depth with social detail; the symbolic and social lives of domestic interiors; and the interplay between social, political and individual histories. Harnessing the tension between realist enchantment and ordinariness, students examine realism’s transfiguration of the commonplace. They immerse themselves in “the tide of affect” (Fredric Jameson) that sweeps over the late nineteenth-century novel and beyond. In all these ways, students explore realism’s transformation through the futures-past of a genre that is increasingly powered by the strange, uncanny and unfamiliar.

• 1Apply a detailed knowledge of the contexts of production and reception of key realist texts in a range of historical and geographical settings.
• 2Reflect on a first-hand acquaintance with global domestic realist fiction in English from the early nineteenth- to the early twenty-first centuries.
• 3Explore a range of literary-critical, cultural-historical and theoretical approaches to realist fiction.
• 4Utilise an introductory understanding of the key critical vocabularies for the discussion of novelistic form.