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Harry E. Shaw - Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot - 9780801489556 - V9780801489556
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Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot

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Description for Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot Paperback. Num Pages: 304 pages, black & white illustrations. BIC Classification: DS. Category: (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 229 x 152 x 17. Weight in Grams: 399.
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, Jurgen 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

Publisher
Cornell University Press
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2004
Condition
New
Number of Pages
304
Place of Publication
Ithaca, United States
ISBN
9780801489556
SKU
V9780801489556
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Harry E. Shaw
Harry E. Shaw is Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot, also published by Cornell University Press, and coauthor of Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Austen to Eliot.

Reviews for Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot
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
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, University of Michigan

Goodreads reviews for Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot


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