The epistolary novel, a prominent form among modern fictions, is defined as a novel presented wholly, or nearly so, in familiar letter form. Its history reaches back to classical literature, taking special inspiration from the separate traditions of the Roman… Read More ›
Realism was by no means a uniform or coherent movement; a tendency toward realism arose in many parts of Europe and in America, beginning in the 1840s. The major figures included Flaubert and Balzac in France, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy… Read More ›
The novels of the French writer Émile Zola (1840–1902) move toward a more extreme form of realism known as naturalism, taking its name from its allegedly scientific impulse to base its characters, events, and explanations on natural rather than supernatural… Read More ›
The Hungarian thinker and aesthetician Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) has played a pivotal role in the development of Western Marxism, which refers to a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and central Europe. The Western Marxists are in opposition… Read More ›
Marxism is a materialist philosophy which tried to interpret the world based on the concrete, natural world around us and the society we live in. It is opposed to idealist philosophy which conceptualizes a spiritual world elsewhere that influences and… Read More ›
Barthes’ analysis of Balzac’s Sarassin in S/Z (1970) has led to some major development in poststructuralist theory. Barthes identifies two main types of literature, roughly corresponding to the 19th century realist novel and the twentieth century experimental modernist novel. Traditionally, the realist… Read More ›
One of the seminal contributions of Roland Barthes, a versatile literary and cultural critic and semiologist, was the poststructuralist distinction between two main types of texts roughly corresponding to nineteenth century realism and twentieth century experimental modernism. In his 1970… Read More ›
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