Contents: Preface: Whatever Happened to Realism? – Introduction: Only Connect? Globalisation and the Problem of Realism – Methodological Problems of the Strike Novel: The Case of GB84 57 – ‘Edging Back into Awareness’: Realisms of the Globalised City 89 – Regeneration: The Historical Novel After Postmodernism – Maurice Gee’s Marginal Realism – Conclusion: Realism in the Valley of Its Saying.
Dougal McNeill teaches postcolonial literature and science fiction in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has published on Scottish literature, Marxist theory and literary imaginings of Japan, and is the author of The Many Lives of Galileo (2005).
«This boldly original book argues that realism has been the missing
element in the post-globalisation revival of Marxism. McNeill sets
out both to defend the desirability and chart the development of a
truly contemporary realism, as he finds it in novels drawn from
England, Scotland, Germany and New Zealand. This new realism will
be emergent and oppositional, in Raymond Williams’s terms, rather
than dominant. And, unlike earlier Lukácsian theories, this new
realist aesthetic will decline to polemicise against other genres,
preferring to form a «readerly united front» against the
reifications of globalisation, alongside the future-investigations
of cyberpunk and science fiction and the ideological interrogations
of metafiction. This truly remarkable book promises to conjoin
ontologies of the present and forecasts of the past to Jameson’s
archaeologies of the future.» (Professor Andrew Milner, Monash
University, Melbourne)
«[...] a stimulating and confident declaration of the validity of
the realist novel in the age of neoliberalism, and of the
continuing relevance of Marxist literary scholarship.» (Elinor
Taylor, Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 11, 2013)
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