Preface

Summary

This book is about the antagonistic tendencies of realist representation. My focus is on the period commonly regarded as the pivotal era of realism in literature, the second half of the nineteenth century. But the book aspires to something larger too: a new understanding of genre, in which two modes normally considered discrete are instead seen to be interpenetrating.

Satire exists to isolate a condition or a sector of human life and hold it up for ridicule. Realism, in its nineteenth-century literary sense, is a method or an attitude seeking to represent experience, especially everyday experience, without implausibility. But toward the end of the Victorian period these two modes blurred into one another beyond easy division. The fiction and criticism of the era imply that to describe the world in starkly realist detail – to pursue and to represent facts and conditions without euphemism – is to expose this same world's essential folly and error. Realism cannot help being satirical, since its method of exposure is also a mode of attack; but satire must also be realistic, for it must persuade us that our failings are so entrenched in everyday life, and so extreme, that they need no embellishment or fantasy when transmuted into fiction. The result is something I name satirical realism, in which human beings are portrayed with nuance – and yet are objects of ridicule simply for being there.