Realist Vision

Realist Vision explores the claim to represent the world “as it is.” Peter Brooks takes a new look at the realist tradition and its intense interest in the visual. Discussing major English and French novels and paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brooks provides a lively and perceptive view of the realist project.
Centering each chapter on a single novel or group of paintings, Brooks examines the “invention” of realism beginning with Balzac and Dickens, its apogee in the work of such as Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola, and its continuing force in James and modernists such as Woolf. He considers also the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud, and such recent phenomena as “photorealism” and “reality TV.”

• Enigmas of Identity
• Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
• Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative
• On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
• Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year
• Henry James Goes to Paris
• The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess