The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady ChatterlyIn The Realistic Imagination, George Levine argues that the Victorian realists and the later modernists were in fact doing similar things in their fiction: they were trying to use language to get beyond language. Levine sees the history of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel as a continuing process in which each generation of writers struggled to escape the grip of convention and attempted to create new language to express their particular sense of reality. As these attempts hardened into new conventions, they generated new attempts to break free. |
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action allows appears attempt Austen becomes begins called characters complex compromise Conrad consciousness continuing conventions course create critical described desire developed direct dream energies example experience extreme fact feeling fiction figure force Frankenstein George Eliot gives Hardy hero human idea ideal imagination implies important intensity ironic kind knowledge landscape language later least less limits literary literature lives materials matter means merely Middlemarch mind monster monstrous moral mountains moves narrative narrator nature never novel novelist object ordinary organism parody particular passion past plot possible precisely present problem protagonists reading realism reality refusal rejection relation requires romance says scientific Scott seems seen self-conscious sense social society sort story structure suggests Thackeray Thackeray's things thought tion tradition Trollope truth turns ultimate Victorian vision Waverley writing
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| Title | The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly |
| Author | George Levine |
| Edition | reprint, revised |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press, 1983 |
| ISBN | 0226475514, 9780226475516 |
| Length | 357 pages |
| Subjects | › Literary Criticism / Books & Reading Literary Criticism / General |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |