Routledge Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies

Posing new questions about realism and the creative power of narratives, Rosa Mucignat takes a fresh look at the relationship between representation and reality. As Mucignat points out, worlds evoked in fiction all depend to a greater or lesser extent on the world we know from experience, but they are neither parasites on nor copies of those realms. Never fully aligned with the real world, stories grow out of the mismatch between reality and representation-those areas of the fictional space that are not located on actual maps, but still form a fully structured imagined geography. Mucignat offers new readings of six foundational texts of modern Western culture: Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, Stendahl'ss The Red and the Black, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education. Using these texts as source material and supporting evidence for a new and comprehensive theory of space in fiction, she examines the links between the nineteenth-century novel's interest in creating substantial, life-like worlds and contemporary developments in science, art, and society. Mucignat's book is an evocative analysis of the way novels marshal their technical and stylistic resources to produce imagined geographies so complex and engrossing that they intensify and even transform the reader's experience of real-life places. Review Mucignat, Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795-1869 Rosa Mucignat, Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies (Oxford: Routledge 2013) 192 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409450559 The title of Rosa Mucignat's Realism and Space in the Novel 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies only palely suggests the nature of this careful, well documented, and very pertinent literary study. Mucignat's book reflects the hybrid nature of the novel in which multiple factors and vectors come to influence its delicate economy. In the play of forces establishing the solidity of characters in the realist novel, space emerges as a newly significant element, rather than a mere backdrop. Striving for an effet de réel – as it will be duly interpreted and called by Barthes – and finally attaining that objective, a spatial dimension is constituted which is consistent and meaningful and alters the reader's perception of the construction of the characters and, obviously, the narrative logic. Mucignat’s work seeks to analyze the strategies that the writers use in order to create a textual cartography, symbolic, conscious of and representative of European realism, from its beginnings at the end of the eighteenth century, up to its most pure and critical form in the work of Gustave Flaubert. Based on the conviction – introduced in the first page – that the insertion of a geographic space, imagined or real, 'gives texture and feel to a story' (1), Mucignat develops a convincing analysis of her chosen texts over the five chapters. The first chapter, 'Making Worlds', is concerned above all with the understanding of the transformative power of the physical agent (also psychological and phantasmatic) called space, utilizing the different perspectives previously analyzed by critics like Barthes, Auerbach, and, in an idiosyncratic way, Bakhtin: visibility, depth, and movement. Following the concept of the chronotope developed by Bakhtin, as well as the Barthesian observation that detailed description changes the narrative code of understanding, Mucignat shows that space contains in itself a more profound and relevant meaning than merely a symbolic, decorative, or representative function: made visible by vivid and accurate descriptions, space comes to play 'a role in the general economy of the diegetic-mimetic unity of the text' (5). Consequently, it constitutes an element that is able to materialize the story that it sets out to tell. In the same way, the depth reached by realist description allows the r