Realism's Empire

<div> <div>If realist novels are the literary avatars of secular science and rational progress then why are so many canonical realist works organized around a fear of that progress? Realism is openly indebted at the level of form and content to imperialist and scientific advances. However critical emphasis on this has obscured the extent to which major novelists of the period openly worried about the fate of mystery and the dissolution of tradition that accompanied science's shrinking of the world. Realism's modernization is inseparable from nostalgia.</div> <div> </div> <div>In <i>Realism's Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel</i><i></i> Geoffrey Baker demonstrates that realist fiction's stance toward both progress and the foreign or supernatural is much more complex than established scholarship has assumed. The work of Honoré de Balzac Anthony Trollope and Theodor Fontane explicitly laments the loss of mystery in the world due to increased knowledge and exploration. To counter this loss and to generate the complications required for narrative these three authors import peripheral usually colonial figures into the metropolitan centers they otherwise depict as disenchanted and rationalized: Paris London and Berlin. Baker's book examines the consequences of this duel for realist narrative and readers' understandings of its historical moment. In so doing Baker shows Balzac Trollope and Fontane grappling with new realities that frustrate their inherited means of representation and oversee a significant shift in the development of the novel.</div> <div> </div> <div> </div> </div>