The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology - Softcover

Audrey Jaffe is Professor of English at the University of Toronto.

"By the end of this invigorating and challenging read, I had a profound admiration for Jaffe's willingness to go straight into the potentially recursive loop of realism and to give us a new picture of its driving mechanisms and the investments both our culture at large and the culture of contemporary literary criticism continue to make in this distinction. Jaffe shows that the claim to the real is always a fantasy and one that involves a claim for power." -- Zarena Aslami, Novel

The author's "meticulously constructed argument compels readers to reflect on just how much their sense of the "realistic" has been constituted by realism's own wishful thinking. This singular intervention invites us to look up from the business of seeking out the "real" and directs us back to the literary source of that desire. It attunes us to how realism imagines itself as a genre and to how realist novels can help us understand "the real" itself as "a genre or mode, a system of representational rules" (p. 17). Most importantly, it illuminates an elusive question urgently worth pursuing: why is realism the form of
fantasy that so many readers cannot stop dreaming about?" --Elaine Auyoung, Nineteenth-Century Literature

"Anyone interested in realism in the Victorian novel should read Jaffe's book. As she addresses the idea of realism in the Victorian novel, Jaffe (Univ. of Toronto) makes the case that these novels portray desire of the real, rather than the real itself. Focusing on such classics as George Eliot's Adam Bede, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Jaffe offers often-brilliant readings that are sophisticated in their attention to detail and in their awareness of critics' earlier claims about realism...Jaffe reminds one that Victorian fiction works with the tension between fantasy and the real, and she points out that critics who try to sever the two miss that productive tension." --S. Bernardo, CHOICE

"In this witty and audacious book, Audrey Jaffe tells us what we always wanted to know about Victorian realism but were too Victorian to ask for ourselves: realism is a desire for realism rather than its realization. Like our own dreams, realist novels build an unstable fantasy of solidity through their use of elaborate narrative defenses, fulfilling our wish for realism but only so as to make reality more manageable. Jaffe's book will change the way we understand literary realism, making us desire it all over again." --Mario Ortiz-Robles, author of The Novel as Event

"Rather than debunking the Victorian novel's claim on the real, Audrey Jaffe listens to it, with an intelligence at once skeptical and sympathetic. The result is a searching revelation of how thoroughly lined with fantasy is the desire for reality, and how powerfully anchored in the real are the most luridly sensational fictions. Along the way, Jaffe deftly demonstrates how the Victorians' reality hunger continues to animate our own critical fantasies." --David Kurnick, author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel

"Jaffe argues that realism and fantasy overlap in the Victorian novel. Her account, showing how the period's desire to capture the real unsettles formal classifications, throws a revealing light on authors from Dickens to Virginia Woolf." --Patricia Ingham, author of The Brontės