MACMILLAN Realist Critiques of Visual Culture: From Hardy to Barnes

Have industrial-age technologies and visual discourses transformed us into spectators of the real, and can realist fiction make that transformation visible to us?  This book brings Situationist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and an array of cultural criticism into dialogue with novels by Hardy, Forster, Woolf, Rushdie, Carey and Barnes to foreground literary realism’s critique of visual culture, including Gothic architectural revival, neoclassicism, tourism, historical pageantry, postcolonial cinema and photography, museums, preservationism, urbanism and artisanal neo-folk movements.  Barnaby advances the concept of meta-spectacle to distinguish realist fiction that engages ethically with visual discourses from realist-ic fiction that reproduces the visible veneer of reality for aesthetic consumption.  He highlights the limitations of artistic critiques of spectacle, considers their resilience toward a culture industry that continuously repackages iconoclasm as iconicity, and reflects upon the process of reorienting the reader to comprehend realist gestures.  By heightening the capacity to recognize our own immersion within objectified representations of the real, Realist Critiques of Visual Culture demonstrates how literary realism remains vital within a society that is so deeply invested in visually replicating and archiving lived experience. Review “Edward Barnaby makes an exhilarating case for major “realists,” from Hardy to Rushdie and Barnes, precisely in their critical relation to the “society of spectacle” analyzed by Guy Debord .  Realist Critiques of Visual Culture renews our sense of the intellectual and political complexity of the great realists in a book of great erudition itself motivated by a very clear vision.” (Peter Brooks, author of Realist Vision and Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris) “Studies of individual authors from across a century have rarely been so effectively connected to argue for an ethos of realism.  A timely addition to the robust tradition of cultural studies devoted to modern visual culture, this book is a major achievement.” (Cristina Della Coletta, author of When Stories Travel: Cross-Cultural Encounters Between Fiction and Film and World’s Fairs Italian-Style: The Great Expositions in Turin and Their Narratives) “This exciting study offers a sophisticated critique of the realist novel, using examples from 19th and 20th-century literary texts that are interwoven in interesting ways. Informed by the work of Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin, and Susan Sontag, Barnaby  expertly demonstrates that individual consciousness is distorted by a visual culture that objectifies reality.” (Leon Litvack, Reader in Victorian Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast, UK) About the Author Edward T. Barnaby is senior assistant dean for graduate programs in the Arts and Sciences and lecturer in English at the University of Virginia, USA.