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1 results

  • Chapter 11 - Realism and Race

  • from Part II - Realism’s Keywords
  • Paul Stasi, University of Albany
  • Book:
    Realism and the Novel
    Published online:
    05 June 2025
    Print publication:
    19 June 2025, pp 160-172

  • Summary

    This chapter addresses both realism and race as epistemological categories. It probes the profound ways in which racial thinking has shaped the form of the novel and asks whether literary realism serves to solidify received racial ideas or offers ways to question and undermine such categories. After framing the debate through the work of critics like Roland Barthes, Toni Morrison, and Elaine Freedgood, the chapter turns to South African literature as a test case, suggesting that scientific racial theories were foundational to the rise of a distinctive form of the realist novel and that during apartheid South African literature was virtually constituted (as Leon de Kock notes) by writers working over a seam of racial difference. It also probes the Lukácsian idea of typicality and asks whether a typical character might be residual rather than emergent, extreme rather than ordinary. The chapter concludes with a discussion of J. M. Coetzee’s fertile reflections on both race and realism and a reading of the troubling novel Disgrace.