ABSTRACT
Realism, I have suggested, is a notoriously tricky term to define. Even when limited to the realm of literary writing it has an aesthetic and a cognitive dimension neither of which can be wholly separated one from the other. Aesthetically, realism refers to certain modes and conventions of verbal and visual representation that can occur at any historical time. Yet realism is associated particularly with the secular and rational forms of knowledge that constitute the tradition of the Enlightenment, stemming from the growth of scientific understanding in the eighteenth century. Underpinning Enlightenment thought is an optimistic belief that human beings can adequately reproduce, by means of verbal and visual representations, both the objective world that is exterior to them and their own subjective responses to that exteriority. Such representations, verbal and visual, are assumed to be mutually recognisable by fellow human beings and form the basis of knowledge about the physical and social worlds. The values of accuracy, adequacy and truth are fundamental to this empirical view of knowledge and its representational form: realism. It follows from this that literary modes of writing that can be recognised as realist are those that, broadly speaking, present themselves as corresponding to the world as it is, using language predominantly as a means of communication rather than verbal display,
and offering rational, secular explanations for all the happenings of the world so represented. Two central theses drive the argument I shall develop throughout this book: firstly, questions of knowledge and relative truth are inseparable from an understanding of realism as a representational form and secondly, our ability to communicate reasonably accurately with each other about the world and ourselves is what makes human community possible. Perhaps not surprisingly, the literary genre most closely associated with realism is the novel, which developed during the eighteenth century alongside Enlightenment thought and alongside more generally that most secular mode of human existence: capitalism. For this reason, aesthetic evaluations of realism are frequently informed by or entangled with views on the development of the Enlightenment, the expansion of capitalist production and the emergence of a modern mass culture.
