All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction

Lilian R. Furst

Published by Duke University Press 1995

All Is True

The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction

Lilian R. Furst

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822377610

Overview
Contents

About this book

"All is true," realist writers would say of their work, to which critics now respond: All is art and artifice. Offering a new approach to reading nineteenth-century realist fiction, Lilian R. Furst seeks to reconcile these contradictory claims. In doing so, she clarifies the deceptions, appropriations, intentions, and ultimately the power of literary realism.
In close textual analyses of works ranging across European and American literature, including paradigmatic texts by Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Thomas Mann, Furst shows how the handling of time, the presentation of place, and certain narrational strategies have served the realists’ claim. She demonstrates how readers today, like those a hundred years ago, are convinced of the authenticity of the created illusion by such means as framing, voice, perspective, and the slippage from metonymy to metaphor. Further, Furst reveals the pains the realists took to conceal these devices, and thus to protect their claim to be employing a simple form. Taking into account both the claims and the covert strategies of these writers, All Is True puts forward an alternative to the conventional polarized reading of the realist text—which emerges here as neither strictly an imitation of an extraneous model nor simply a web of words but a brilliantly complex imbrication of the two.
A major statement on one of the most enduring forms in cultural history, this book promises to alter not only our view of realist fiction but our understanding of how we read it.

Author / Editor information

Lilian R. Furst is Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Reviews

"A truly outstanding work. I would be hard pressed to think of a more scholarly, more substantial, more insightful study on European realism."—Virgil Nemoianu, Catholic University of America

"A work of synthetic scholarship that re-visions the field of late 19th-century realism comprehensively, All is True treats quite wonderfully and originally the implied acts of reading and reacting to such fiction—what is demanded of the reader and how the reader is guided to these demands. And it treats the inner life of consciousness that realism can elicit, the points of view that it takes, the language and illusions it must inevitably use, and the names that haunt it."—James Engell, Harvard University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
1 Truth to Tell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2 Let's Pretend ... Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	28
3 Framing the Fiction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	48
4 Not So Long Ago Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
5 The Game of the Name Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
6 Landscapes of Consciousness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	116
7 Figuring the Pretense Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146
8 The Enactment of Place Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	174
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 256

eBook

Published: October 11, 1995
ISBN: 9780822377610