Studies in the English Novel: Genre Trouble: Realism and Its Others

Realism, even at its 19th-century apex in Great Britain and the US, always had a vexed relationship with neighboring novelistic genres. Present-day theoretical and critical debates on realism's limits and affordances (Jameson, Ranciere, Gallagher, Moi, Woloch et al.) allow us to explore, taxonomize and theorize a half-century-long contact zone. Canonical realist fiction (Gaskell, Eliot) shapes and is shaped by sensation (Wilde), naturalism (Twain and Hardy), fantasy (Jefferies), horror and the supernatural (Chesnutt), "scientific romance" (Wells), the "verse novel" (Meredith). Culminates with realist-adjacent Modernism (Ford, Woolf).