Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot

by Harry E. Shaw

Overview

Narrating Reality offers a provocative and original critique of nineteenth-century British realist fiction and our ways of understanding it. Paying close attention to the role of the narrator, Harry E. Shaw challenges the denigration of realism that has become a critical orthodoxy in recent decades. Drawing on such thinkers as Erich Auerbach, Jürgen Habermas, and J. L. Austin, Shaw contends that realist novels claim not to replicate the world in their pages or to offer transparent access to it, but to involve readers in a process of narrative understanding adequate to grasping the complexities of life in history. Seen in this light, the works of such novelists as Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and George Eliot, as they depict their own and other cultures and strive to imagine regions of freedom in the dense and constricting web of history, gain a new interest.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801489556
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/30/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Harry E. Shaw is Senior Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at Cornell University. He is author of The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (also from Cornell) and editor of Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels.

What People are Saying About This

John Kucich

Narrating Reality generates an original and affirmative account about nineteenth-century realism. Harry E. Shaw's contentions about realism are extremely provocative, and are targeted very effectively against the dominant critical positions on realism of our times. Shaw incorporates the most important texts on realism written over the past hundred years, while also ranging broadly over philosophical and theoretical works. The book applies its affirmative perspective on realism to three novelists in ways that both illustrate the tenets of the main argument while also advancing it in important new directions. All in all, Shaw's analysis is more rigorous and more clarifying than anything I have read on the subject in the last ten or fifteen years. It is without question the most original defense of realism I have come across in a long time.

Editorial Reviews

This work is a classic example of statement and amplification: the notion of realism is the focus, the examination of the works of Austen, Scott, and Eliot the demonstration of that idea. The book is judicious, balanced, tightly structured, and tremendously informed.... With a sharply defined focus and a lucid, close-to-informal style, Shaw adeptly leads his reader through what can easily be a bewildering and overlapping maze of narratological theories.... A significant and original analysis.

Choice

This is a powerfully integrative book.... Narrating Reality is... as much a dramatic exercise in critical self-scrutiny as it is an analysis of a literary tradition... A remarkable, often moving book.

--Andrew H. Miller, Indiana University "Victorian Studies"

This work is a classic example of statement and amplification: the notion of realism is the focus, the examination of the works of Austen, Scott, and Eliot the demonstration of that idea. The book is judicious, balanced, tightly structured, and tremendously informed.... With a sharply defined focus and a lucid, close-to-informal style, Shaw adeptly leads his reader through what can easily be a bewildering and overlapping maze of narratological theories.... A significant and original analysis.

-- "Choice"

From the Publisher

"This is a powerfully integrative book.... Narrating Reality is... as much a dramatic exercise in critical self-scrutiny as it is an analysis of a literary tradition... A remarkable, often moving book."

Victorian Studies - Andrew H. Miller

"Narrating Reality generates an original and affirmative account about nineteenth-century realism. Harry E. Shaw's contentions about realism are extremely provocative, and are targeted very effectively against the dominant critical positions on realism of our times. Shaw incorporates the most important texts on realism written over the past hundred years, while also ranging broadly over philosophical and theoretical works. The book applies its affirmative perspective on realism to three novelists in ways that both illustrate the tenets of the main argument while also advancing it in important new directions. All in all, Shaw's analysis is more rigorous and more clarifying than anything I have read on the subject in the last ten or fifteen years. It is without question the most original defense of realism I have come across in a long time."

John Kucich