\"Hayden White...is the most prominent American scholar to unite historiography and literary criticism into a broader reflection on narrative and cultural understanding.\" --'The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism' In his earlier books such as 'Tropics of Discourse' and 'The Content of the Form', Hayden White focused on the conventions of historical writing and on the ordering of historical consciousness. In 'Figural Realism', White collects eight interrelated essays primarily concerned with the treatment of history in recent literary critical discourse. \"'History' is not only an object we can study,\" writes White, \"it is also and even primarily a certain kind of relationship to 'the past' mediated by a distinctive kind of written discourse. It is because historical discourse is actualized in its culturally significant form as a specific kind of writing that we may consider the relevance of literary theory to both the theory and the practice of historiography.\

Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (review)

Bibliography – Archival Sources

The smoke-laden fog of London is one of the most vivid elements in English literature, richly suggestive and blurring boundaries between nature and society in compelling ways. In The Sky of Our Manufacture, Jesse Oak Taylor uses the many depictions of the London fog in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel to explore the emergence of anthropogenic climate change. In the process, Taylor argues for the importance of fiction in understanding climatic shifts, environmental pollution, and ecological collapse. The London fog earned the portmanteau "smog" in 1905, a significant recognition of what was arguably the first instance of a climatic phenomenon manufactured by modern industry. Tracing the path to this awareness opens a critical vantage point on the Anthropocene, a new geologic age in which the transformation of humanity into a climate-changing force has not only altered our physical atmosphere but imbued it with new meanings. The book examines enduringly popular works--from the novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and the Sherlock Holmes mysteries to works by Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf--alongside newspaper cartoons, scientific writings, and meteorological technologies to reveal a fascinating relationship between our cultural climate and the sky overhead.

The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf

Cette these porte sur le renouvellement du realisme dans la production narrative espagnole des annees 2000, a partir d’un corpus de quatre romans, et se demande : en quoi consiste l’esthetique realiste actuelle, quelle est son epistemologie et quel lien entretient-elle avec d’autres discours de savoir ? Quel role jouent les recits realistes dans la configuration des imaginaires sociaux, alors que sont remis en question l’heritage de la transition democratique et le recit de la modernisation espagnole ? Sont d’abord examinees les conditions de possibilite historiques, socio-economiques et culturelles d’un renouveau du realisme – cartographie dans le champ litteraire des vingt dernieres annees. Hypothese centrale : le realisme ressurgit du fait que les debats de memoire historique depuis 2000 et la crise economique, sociale et politique depuis 2008 engagent une revision du mythe de la Transition et du projet de la modernite qui structurait les imaginaires sociaux espagnols depuis les annees 1960. Trois parties proposent des etudes de poetiques realistes, en diachronie et en synchronie, pour mettre en valeur l’evolution des modes de referentialite realistes entre le debut des annees 2000 et le debut des annees 2010, avec la crise de 2008 et ses premices pour point d’inflexion. La premiere partie porte sur deux romans (Antonio Munoz Molina, Sefarad, 2001 et Ignacio Martinez de Pison, Enterrar a los muertos, 2005) qui dialoguent avec la fabrication sociale de documents et l’historiographie pour reinterpreter la guerre de 1936, de la dictature et de la transition. Les deuxieme et troisieme parties (Rafael Chirbes, Crematorio, 2007, et Isaac Rosa, La mano invisible, 2011) analysent l’elaboration d’un recit collectif de l’Espagne developpementaliste, a l’aube de la crise, par des romans qui dialoguent avec la theorie economique et la sociologie historique. Au carrefour du litteraire, des discours sociaux, de l’histoire et de la sociologie contemporaine de l’Espagne, cette these soutient que la reappropriation du realisme dans les annees 2000 participe a la remise en question d’une identite nationale democratique et moderne, au resurgissement d’une realite problematique et d’imaginaires sociaux paramodernes apres l’ecroulement du metarecit d’une transition modele. Si les romans cherchent tous a prendre en charge le reel social selon ses representations, ils se differencient par leur traitement de la question politique de ce que « reel » veut dire, par le choix du chemin selon lequel le decrire, et par l’evaluation de la nature des causes historiques et materielles de la realite qu’habitent les ecrivains.

https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01746009/document

Nouveaux réalismes et imaginaires sociaux de la modernité dans le roman espagnol contemporain (2001-2011)

The dissertation enquires into some of the forms that the reception of ancient Greek tragedy took in England between 1660 and 1760. It looks at those critics and translators who engaged most with ancient Greek tragedy and whose engagement was accompanied by an interest in ancient theory and native English literature. Chapter 1, after examining works by George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmershe, Thomas Goffe, Thomas May and Christopher Wase, considers William Joyner’s original tragedy The Roman Empress (1670) in order to see what use Joyner made of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Euripides’ Hippolytus and Medea. Chapter 2 turns to the writings of, especially, John Dryden, Thomas Rymer, John Dennis and Charles Gildon, who were the most prolific and interesting commentators on dramatic theory in England at this time, and assesses their different perspectives on the questions of tragedy and the modern stage. Chapter 3 addresses separately comments on ancient Greek tragedy contained in Jeremy Collier’s attack on contemporary English theatre in A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) and in replies to him. Chapter 4 concentrates on Lewis Theobald’s translations of Sophocles’ Electra (1714) and Oedipus (1715) and how his views of ancient Greek tragedy influenced, and were influenced by, his interest in Shakespeare, an edition of whose plays he published in 1733. Chapter 5 examines Thomas Francklin’s The Tragedies of Sophocles and A Dissertation on Antient Tragedy (both 1759) and how they reflect his interest in the contemporary stage and contemporary ideas about the value of simplicity in literature and art. I argue that the writers I examine reflect through their engagement with Greek tragedy ideas about the relationships between ancient and early modern English tragedy, particularly that of Shakespeare, and between the present and the past.

The Reception of Ancient Greek Tragedy in England 1660-1760

Rae Greiner proposes that sympathy is integral to the form of the classic nineteenth-century realist novel. Following the philosophy of Adam Smith, Greiner argues that sympathy does more than foster emotional identification with others; it is a way of thinking along with them. By abstracting emotions, feelings turn into detached figures of speech that may be shared. Sympathy in this way produces realism; it is the imaginative process through which the real is substantiated. In "Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction" Greiner shows how this imaginative process of sympathy is written into three novelistic techniques regularly associated with nineteenth-century fiction: metonymy, free indirect discourse, and realist characterization. She explores the work of sentimentalist philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham and realist novelists Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James.

Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Talk about novel-reading and sympathy and you are likely to spend some of that time talking about omniscience. If your subject is the nineteenth-century realist novel, you will probably have something to say about the relationship between ethi cal feeling and free indirect discourse which suggests that peering into the secret hearts and minds of characters enables our sympathy for them, and thus that "sym pathy" names that special ability to cultivate our identification with others through feeling what they feel and knowing what they know, or what they are thinking about. In this vein omniscient narration, shrinking the distance between ourselves and oth ers, encourages sympathy: the assumption is that by knowing more?of what others know or think along with what they don't?we draw closer and more inclined to sympathize with their conditions. The link between sympathy and knowledge is all but guaranteed in this formulation, as indeed it regularly goes without saying that fa cilitating our sympathetic identification with characters is what many English real ists' experiments in omniscience were designed to do. Sympathy in such novels, so the story goes, results from both seeing and knowing: the unique seeing into and knowledge of interiors afforded by the nineteenth-century novel's most celebrated

Sympathy time: adam smith, george eliot, and the realist novel

Anchored in a reading of Jane Austen's Persuasion , this essay proposes three main claims. The first treats Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments as narrative theory and argues for its important and under-recognized influence on the development of nineteenth-century realism. The second posits a relationship between Smith's model of sympathy and nineteenth-century literary realism, offering a new term--sympathetic realism--to account for that realism's formal structure. The third argues that Persuasion demonstrates Austen's determination to wed Smithian theory to the novel form, primarily through exemplification and the strategy of making cases, labor performed by both the novel's heroine and its form.

Rae Greiner

Papers

Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Sympathy time: adam smith, george eliot, and the realist novel

The Art of Knowing Your Own Nothingness

Bleak House: pastoral

Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference