The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination
Sotirios Paraschas
Click cover to enlarge | Studies In Comparative Literature 28 Legenda 28 May 2013 • 236pp ISBN: 978-1-907975-70-7 (hardback) • RRP £80, $110, €95 ISBN: 978-1-351191-87-6 (Taylor & Francis ebook) ModernFrenchGermanEnglishFiction The nineteenth century realist author was a contradictory figure. He was the focus of literary criticism, but obscured his creative role by insisting on presenting his works as ‘copies’ of reality. He was a celebrity who found himself subservient to publishers and the public, in a newly-industrialised literary marketplace. He was the owner of his work who was divested of his property by imperfect copyright laws, playwrights who adapted his novels for the stage, and sequel-writers. This combination of a conspicuous yet precarious status with a self-effacing attitude was expressed by an image of the author as a plural, Protean subject, possessing the faculty of sympathetic imagination – which the realists incorporated in their works in the form of a series of fictional characters who functioned as ‘doubles’ of the author. Paraschas focuses on two realists, Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot, and traces this authorial scenario from its origins in the late eighteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, examining its presence in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Baudelaire and André Gide. Sotirios Paraschas is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in French at the University of Warwick. Reviews:
Bibliography entry: Paraschas, Sotirios, The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination, Studies In Comparative Literature, 28 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2013) First footnote reference: 35 Sotirios Paraschas, The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination, Studies In Comparative Literature, 28 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2013), p. 21. Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Paraschas, p. 47. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) Bibliography entry: Paraschas, Sotirios. 2013. The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination, Studies In Comparative Literature, 28 (Cambridge: Legenda) Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Paraschas 2013: 21). Example footnote reference: 35 Paraschas 2013: 21. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)
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