In his recently published bookThe Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson presents his take on the pervasive struggle between the realist mode's origins and its ostensible demise. Throughout his career, Jameson has been dissatisfied with the numerous binary oppositions into which realism is so often inserted and the insufficiently historicized value judgments that tend to go with them.Footnote ¹ In this new work, Jameson argues that realism is instead caught between and constituted by the opposing poles of story and affect. He argues that “the irrevocable antagonism between [these] twin (and entwined) forces . . . are never reconciled, never fold back into one another in some ultimate reconciliation and identity; and the very force and pungency of the realist writing [here examined] is predicated on that tension, which must remain an impossible one, under pain of losing itself altogether and dissipating if it is ever resolved in favor of one of the parties to the struggle” (11). Jameson locates the “final battle” between the antinomies of realism “in the microstructures of language” and “against the dominance of point of view which seems to hold the affective impulses in check and lend them the organizing attribution of a central consciousness” (11). For Jameson, this formal and linguistic face-off “exhaust[s] and destroy[s]” realism, and whatever “odd assortment of random tools and techniques” we recognize in the post-nineteenth-century world are but remnants of realism's “shriveled posterity” (11). Thus, Jameson insists the book of realism is closed, and as Harry Shaw has noted, “he appears . . . to have maintained a consistent line throughout his career” (Narrating Reality 27n31).

Such a brief encapsulation fails to do any kind of justice to Jameson's breathtaking analysis, which ranges widely and generates much fecund ground for future work. But it is important to emphasize how Jameson's new interest in the extra-linguistic power of affect aligns with his career-long position: as he embraces Lukács's belief in the value of realism's attempts at totality, he also contends that the objective totality of history is “nontextual,” and thus unable to be grasped fully (Shaw 28). Thus, Jameson argues that as the tales of realism attempt to capture history in sequential time, realism's representations of affect create an eternal “present of consciousness” that forestalls full textual representation (Antinomies 24).

I begin this review essay here because Jameson's conception of realism has long been a polarizing force in studies of the mode. On the one hand, Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and queer literary critics have embraced his method of “symptomatic reading,” which unearths meaning from textual gaps and occlusions and enables interpretations that give utterance to stories hidden by what he calls “the inert givens and materials” of the text (The Political Unconscious 75). On the other hand, critics from a range of theoretical backgrounds find that a symptomatic approach misses much of what Victorian novels can show us. In Narrating Reality (1999), Harry Shaw responds both to the century-long debate surrounding realism and the much more recent trend toward symptomatic reading with a call to “listen to the realist narrator” by “working through the grain” of the text. He argues that doing so reveals how the realist novel cultivates a historical “habit of mind” (ix-x). In Between Women (2007), Sharon Marcus argues that Jameson's “surface/depth model” unjustly dismisses what the grain of nineteenth-century texts can tell us about the nuances of Victorian conceptions of intimacy. And more recently, Lauren Goodlad argues that despite the tremendous usefulness of Jameson's symptomatic approach to reading aesthetic expressions of what he calls the “geopolitical unconscious” in modernist and post-modernist works, his career-long tendency to boil realism down to a more or less unified “epistemological claim . . . masquerad[ing] as an aesthetic ideal” (Jameson, Antinomies 5) hinders studies of the geopolitical aesthetic in the Victorian period (Goodlad 405). Goodlad proposes a new critical practice that revises Jameson's theory to recognize “the global fabric of nineteenth-century literature and culture” (405).

All of the books reviewed in this essay examine the weave of this thick and complex fabric. Each one explores how the realist novel shuttled among a number of different cultural and discursive threads. With this essay, I want to emphasize the networks of realism – the fascinating connections it uncovers or makes possible – rather than the antinomies that ostensibly govern it. With Jameson's Antinomies as our access point, we can trace a vast network of critical perspectives reaching back to Erich Auerbach's Mimesis; more recent scholarly works harness the generative power of realist progression to explore a wide-ranging cultural and discursive realist network. This essay will first sketch the critical network's definition and redefinition of the boundaries of realism, and then survey recent works by Rae Greiner, Richard Menke, Daniel Novak, Tanya Agathocleous, and Deborah Shapple Spillman, all of which take up these definitions alongside a variety of critical lenses to explore the various ways that Victorians used realism to negotiate the disorientation brought on by the culture's emerging networks.

Though affect is a novel addition to Jameson's theory of realism, its role in the formal struggle between what can and cannot be sequentially told is not a new idea. For example, Shaw extends Marshall Brown's view of realism as the “interplay [of] Jakobson's metonymic or sequential order [and] metaphorical or substitutional order,” toward the realm of affect (Brown, “The Logic of Realism” 231). With regard to George Eliot, Shaw argues that even within scenes that depict inchoate affective intensity through metaphor, realism is always conscious of sequential history: “Without reference to her place in history, we cannot . . . grasp the precise nature of Dorothea's psychological situation to participate in it” (Shaw 231). George Levine argues that the synthesis of this tense interplay between sequence and affect, metonym and metaphor, is “responsive to the changing nature of reality as the culture understood it, and evoking with each question another question to be questioned, each threatening to destroy that question beyond words” (Realistic Imagination 22). In this way, Levine argues Victorian realist authors self-consciously pin-pointed and parodied novelistic conventions that they thought to be lacking, replaced them with their improved vision, and thus offered new conventions for other authors to parody and replace.

For Levine and such critics as Raymond Williams and Katherine Kearns the end of realism is marked by the turn of the century shift in the dominant structure of feeling about how individuals relate to society. But as Rachel Bowlby has recently argued, though modernist novelists seemed to turn their backs on external social life as they “relocated . . . the right representation of reality” within consciousness, their goal was much the same as that of their realist forebears. Bowlby contends that when Virginia Woolf articulates in “Modern Fiction” that the novel should “look within” to find its proper object, she offers her “version of the structure whereby a new aesthetic is presented as a new realism ousting another one . . . through a simplifying parody of the ‘external world’” (Adventures in Realism xvi). Woolf's theory of fiction thus enters into the realist progression as Levine has defined it. Further, Bowlby argues that the line dividing inner and outer reality dissolves when we consider that the makings of Woolf's reality are provoked by material and social realities.

On formal and social grounds alike, scholars continue to debate the contours of literary realism. The new works surveyed here take up different positions around that debate, but all are open to realism's porosity. Their wide-ranging approaches to realism follow George Levine's contention that because such a wide range of nineteenth-century texts was influenced by the over-arching cultural obsession with epistemology and ethics, they should all be considered part of “the history and discourse of realism” (Novak 156n22).Footnote ² All of the following critical works embrace this broad range of Victorian realist discourse.

Following the work of Levine, Brown, and Shaw, Rae Greiner's Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (2012) argues that the realist novel defines the experience of reality through its relation to an imagined sympathetic network. As she reads the grain of nineteenth-century realist novels alongside Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, she argues that in addition to cultivating a historically bounded ontological condition, as Shaw contends, realist authors also employ historically determined “protocols of sympathy” (Greiner 9) to create the realist mode. Distance is key for this sympathetic network; Greiner contends that the reality these novels depict is defined by the imaginative, not the emotional, processes of sympathy. Whereas the bulk of critical attention paid to theories of sympathy and the novel emphasize Hume's conception of emotional contagion, Greiner sheds new light on the impact of sympathetic discourse on nineteenth-century realism, emphasizing “the easily forgotten fact that sympathy and feeling are not the same” (16). Keeping this in mind clarifies how sympathy, like realism, “designates a way for minds to conceive other people and situations and make judgments about their conditions” (16).

The first half of the book shows how key parallels between realist narrative and Smithian sympathy comprise “sympathetic realism.” Greiner skillfully illustrates, first, how realist metonymy “brings fellow-feeling to bear on the imaginative reconstruction of the historical past,” and, second, how free indirect discourse “weds the individual and the public mind, . . . defin[ing] subjectivity as one of narrative's most important sympathetic effects” (12). Greiner expands upon these parallels through readings of a range of Victorian texts. For example, Greiner reads Bentham and Jane Austen alongside what James Chandler calls Smith's “sentimental case against casuistry,” in order to illustrate how “realism's evaluative economy is shaped by the cases it makes available or denies” (Chandler qtd. in Greiner 53, 52). Throughout the work, Greiner emphasizes how a particularly Smithean discourse of sympathy became naturalized in Victorian culture, and that as realist authors espoused this kind of imaginative sympathy they also emphasized the dangers of emotional closeness. She concludes the book with an insightful illustration of how George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James confronted these dangers as they attempted to “disentangle sympathy from omniscience, identification, and knowledge” (125). Greiner works through their shared concern that the obligation to emotionally identify with others diminishes sympathy, and further that the ability to know the inmost thoughts and feelings of others can disable the capacity for sympathy altogether.

The Victorian apprehension about excessive knowledge of other minds relates to the uncomfortable sense of intimacy that emerging technologies created. In Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (2008), Richard Menke explores relations among Victorian realist fiction, mass culture, and new networks of communication (5). Informed by Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong's classic theories of media and Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's more recent work on “the reciprocal ‘remediation’ between old and new media,” Menke argues that realist fiction's responses to what he calls “the nineteenth century's new media” helped to redefine the culture's thinking “about information, communication, and language” (3). Framing his work with reference to parallels between rapid nineteenth- and twenty-first-century media innovations, Menke aims not only to explore how Victorian realism mediated new technologies, but also how the networks created by these new technologies formed “systems for setting down, processing, and circulating discourse, systems that linked media to each other as well as to the bodies and minds of their users” (8).

Menke structures his rich analysis with the guiding concepts of the network, information, and flow. He argues that the Victorian conception of information as flow within a network opened questions about the inter-penetrability of information and bodies through “the hydraulic or fluvial language used to describe the physiology of the body, the emanations of the spirit, or the invisible motions of electricity or ether” (21). The flow of “bodiless information” through the network generates what Menke calls “the ideology of circulation,” which the book traces both through analyses of Victorian new media and a range of canonical and popular works of fiction (20). Menke's first section maps connections between innovations in these new modes of communication and their “literary reference points” (27). For example, he considers how early Victorian novels’ implicit “invocations of the telegraph,” such as Jane and Rochester's long-distance telepathy in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, gesture toward a broad cultural sense that telegraphy would destroy distance. The book's second section moves into mid-century and explores how Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and Eliot's The Lifted Veil explicitly responded to the possibilities and dangers presented by new media and disembodied information. Menke concludes with a study of Henry James's “In the Cage” and Rudyard Kipling's “Wireless,” in which he argues that as these works confront the potential of telegraphic and wireless technology to alter reality through representation; they not only indicate their turn toward modernism, but also emphasize just how much influence these new technologies could have upon perceptions of reality.

Of course, new technologies of mass communication were not the only innovations capable of mediating our conception of reality. As Nancy Armstrong argues in Fiction in the Age of Photography (1999), realist fiction adopted the photograph, transformed it into both “a way of seeing” and a shared “picture of the world,” and endorsed its powers of identification (7). However, in Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2008), Daniel Novak takes a different approach to the relationship between Victorian photography and realist fiction. Novak's theory emerges from the language that Victorians themselves used about photography, which “emphasizes anonymity over identity, exchangeability over uniqueness, fictionality over authenticity” (151). Thus, Novak differs from Armstrong in his insistence that Victorian photography did not attempt to define the real world, but rather “set the standard for what was not real . . . defin[ing] and produc[ing] the impossible and the abstract” (6).

Novak organizes his study around the composite photography of Oscar Gustav Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, and the models whose photographed body parts these artists rearranged and interchanged. As Novak articulates this paradoxical network of connection through amputation, he draws upon Marx's theory of the abstraction of labor into interchangeable, anonymous “membra disjecta” and explores how such photographic practices contributed to the general Victorian conception of photography as a form of torture. Novak pairs these ideas with the theories of Georg Lukács, Terry Eagleton, and Michael McKeon in order to illustrate how such violent conceptions of photography contribute to “a homology for the novel-form and its effort to combine its parts into a coherent whole” (8).

Early in the book, Novak traces the treatment of the photographic manipulation of model bodies in three discrete sets of texts: Victorian literary journalism, Marx's theories, and Dickens's artist-model essays. This overview of the dominant contours of Victorian photographic culture informs the rest of Novak's analysis of how Victorian definitions of both photographic realism and photographic identity “contextualize figures that seem out of place in the realist novel” (31). Novak links the theories of Mieke Bal and Lukács to emphasize the ways in which totality is given through “the figure of synecdoche,” which in turn offers “a model” for the readerly construction of one “‘text’ from the multiple, interrupted, and incomplete acts of reading” (71). Novak then traces synecdochic instances of the amputated, interchangeable body through Dickens's Little Dorrit. The latter part of the book addresses the paradoxes of identity that arise from the abstraction of Victorian photography. For example, Novak reads Eliot's “vague and typological representation” of Daniel Deronda in conjunction with the development of Francis Galton's composite photography. Novak argues that both Eliot and Galton make “photographic fiction into photographic science,” wherein “a non-existent body” is transformed into “a type [that is] derived with scientific accuracy, a photographic science fiction” (33).

While Novak's Victorian theory of photography articulates a paradoxical network wherein abstract, anonymous bodies-in-pieces share space in compositions of reality, Tanya Agathocleous uses the opposed visual forms of the sketch and the panorama to explore the different ways that Victorian writers mediated the fragmentary quality of urban existence. In Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World (2011), Agathocleous traces these opposed visual figures through a range of nineteenth-century texts and contends that the shifts in perspective, from “polis to kosmos and back again,” produce “both a sense of detailed, accumulative local knowledge and an ideal of totality,” which reinforced a sense of community in the face of an increasingly complex and alienating modern world (xvi). She begins her rich and nuanced study of “cosmopolitan realism” by articulating two “contradictory and overlapping . . . strands” that define “cosmopolitanism”: on the one hand, Victorians often used the term the way we now use “globalization,” to describe “the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (Roland Robertson qtd. in Agathocleous 2); on the other hand, the idealistic, Kantian version of cosmopolitanism was also widely used, which saw the globalized economy as a means to “universal brotherhood” and “perpetual peace” (2). Agathocleous argues that the utopianism of this second view informed cosmopolitan realism's attempts to “re-enchant” the world “by subjecting it to the alchemical power of the imagination” (7).Footnote ³

Employing Fredric Jameson's conception of “cognitive mapping” alongside Benedict Anderson and James Buzard's historical and geographical analyses of nationalism, Agathocleous offers an impressive depiction of cosmopolitanism's simultaneous capacity to enable the imagination of the world as a whole, to acknowledge “the delimiting forces that draw it together,” and yet to foster hope for the eventual transcendence of those forces (9). Early on, Agathocleous argues that the sketch and the panorama generate Lukács's “logic of synecdoche,” but instead of recalling the wider world to a provincial location (like Eliot's micro- and telescopic views do in Middlemarch), these texts create London either as “the world itself or a figure for global modernity” (72). The rest of the book demonstrates how the sketch and the panorama increasingly “became exaggerated and attenuated over the course of the century” (114). Agathocleous analyzes pairs of generically dissimilar texts, such as Henry James's The Princess Casamassima and Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, and argues that the “international landscape” of the city at the fin de siècle provoked greatly exaggerated forms of the sketch and the panorama (114). The final chapter turns its attention to the early twenty-first century and argues that such texts as Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Stephen Frears's film Dirty Pretty Things, and Patrick Keiller's London all share the nineteenth-century's “fascination with the city,” though their emphasis upon multi-cultural community shifts the perspective from “the urban investigator” so often featured in nineteenth-century texts, to “previously marginalized figures, such as refugees, struggling immigrants, and . . . disaffected queer intellectuals” (xxii).

Highlighting the position of such marginalized figures on the global network is the key concern in Deborah Shapple Spillman's British Colonial Realism in Africa: Inalienable Objects, Contested Domains (2012). Spillman reads works by such authors as Joseph Conrad, Olive Shreiner, and Anna Howarth against a broad range of nineteenth-century African texts, including sculptures, paintings, essays, and folklore; her study sheds new light on the relationship between “British literary realism in colonial Africa” and the ongoing scramble for land and resources. Spillman contends that these “conflicts help direct our attention toward tensions between Victorian and African perceptions of objects and practices of exchange, tensions that resonate formally in realist narratives” (ix). The literary works she studies span the years of 1883 to 1899, but Spillman has arranged them in more or less reverse chronological order so that she can approach the representational problems of colonial realism simultaneously from genealogical, retrospective, and “archaeological” perspectives. Beginning at the end allows Spillman to trace the characteristics of the “arguably overtly self-conscious, anti-colonial narrative” in Heart of Darkness, which in turn enables her to track a “series of crises back in time,” and thus unearth “the history of an emerging skepticism regarding the ability to know and to control others through their objects” (14).

Following Homi Bhabha's notion of double vision, Spillman's approach seeks to do three things: to read the texts of colonial realism for aberrations and opacities, to note how those oddities call out for counternarratives, and then to include African counternarrative texts in her analysis. As she reads these counternarratives, Spillman pairs postcolonial theory with Bill Brown and Elaine Freedgood's object relations theories “in order to foreground the diverse material relations characterizing colonial life that exceed realism's schema” (13). Early in the book, she establishes her conceptual framework by tracing connections among realism, ethnography, and colonial discourse; she then explores how the structures of realism were imposed in colonial discourse through the circulation of “guides to observation,” which Victorian anthropologists at home used to control ethnographers in the field in the name of transparency and objectivity.

As she reads the textual opacities of colonial realism and turns to the multi-modal counternarratives they call up, Spillman balances symptomatic reading and reading with the grain to generate much fruitful analysis. Indeed, each new work in this survey balances attention to the grain of realism with the deft application of various critical lenses. Their analyses of sympathetic, telegraphic, photographic, cosmopolitan, and colonial discourses illustrate a vibrant network of realism, which encompasses both the Victorians and subsequent generations of Victorian scholars. The history of realist scholarship is long; as Jameson notes, mimesis is “the most ancient literary category of all” (Antinomies 1). Yet the propulsive force created by the dialectic interplay of the tale and affect, of metonym and metaphor, offers an incredibly rich and varied method for representing how one understands one's own lived reality. Though realism is very old, and may in fact be long dead, both the recent critical turn toward affect and the abundance of scholarship on how Victorians imagined themselves into a range of communities promise that the book of Victorian realism is still being written.