ABSTRACT
Realism has often been touted as a reaction against Romanticism. If Émile Zola makes this case in the 1880s, more recent scholars of realism, like George Levine, have argued that one of realist narrative’s core strategies is the devaluation of various aspects of Romanticism in both content and form. Yet realist appreciations of Romantic narrative did much more than mock or reject romance. Rather, certain Romantic tropes and figures provided realists the means to engage questions of space, identity, and representation, questions which became increasingly complex over the course of the nineteenth century. This chapter focuses on Walter Scott, reading his shifting reputation between Balzac in the 1830s and Lukács in the 1930s as emblematic of evolving understandings of what realism and Romanticism were. A closer look at a few canonical authors of realism—including Eliot, Trollope, Fontane, and Flaubert—then demonstrates how these realists appropriated and revised Scott not merely to demonstrate the difference and superiority of realism, but rather as a complex site for engaging realism’s fundamental questions about the representation of identities and spaces, the epistemology on which representation can be based, and the potential of textual representation itself.
