Realism, Representation, and Art in Nineteenth Century Literature
by Alison Byerly
Cambridge University Press, 1997
ISBN 0-521-58116-8
This book confronts a significant paradox in the development of literary Realism: the very novels that present themselves as purveyors and celebrants of direct, ordinary human experience also manifest an obsession with art that threatens to sabotage their Realist claims. Unlike previous studies of the role of visual art, music, or theatre in Victorian literature, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature examines the juxtaposition of all of these arts in the works of Charlotte Bronté,WilliamThackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and others. Alison Byerly combines close textual analysis with an examination of the relative status of different arts within nineteenth-century British culture. Her book, which also contains sixteen illustrations, represents an effort to bridge the growing gap between aesthetics and cultural studies.
