The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism

Mary K. Holland

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501362637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literature has never looked weirder--full of images, colors, gadgets, and footnotes, and violating established norms of character, plot, and narrative structure. Yet over the last 30 years, critics have coined more than 20 new "realisms" in their attempts to describe it.
What makes this decidedly unorthodox literature "realistic"? And if it is, then what does "realism" mean anymore? Examining literature by dozens of writers, and over a century of theory and criticism about realism, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism sorts through the current critical confusion to illustrate how our ideas about what is real and how best to depict it have changed dramatically, especially in recent years. Along the way, Mary K. Holland guides the reader on a lively tour through the landscape of contemporary literary studies--taking in metafiction, ideology, posthumanism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism--with forays into quantum mechanics, new materialism, and Buddhism as well, to give us entirely new ways of viewing how humans use language to make sense of--and to make--the world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: The Problem of “Realism”
• Introduction: A Brief History of Realisms
• 1 Metafictive Realism: David Foster Wallace and the Future of (Meta)Fiction
• 2 The Work of Art after the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Fiction of Steve Tomasula
• 3 Material Realism and New Materialism: Literature from the 1990s to the Present
• 4 Quantum Realism: On Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
• 5 Quantum Realism Case Study: On Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist
• Conclusion: Realism and Periodizing after Postmodernism
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright