Dickens and reality
"The progress of Dickens' career as a novelist and the rise of realism in he fiction of the nineeenth century were almost exactly coterminous, and both were triumphant. Dickens' influence on writers usually regarded as realists, such as Turgenieff, Tolstoy, and George Eliot, has been acknowledged for a long time. But the high critical estimate of Dickens' novels today is based largely on those aspects which are least realistic: their grotesquerie and expressionism, their symbolic and "myth-making," their artistic affinities with twentieth-century modernism. In Dickens and Reality, John Romano considers the relation between the realistic and imaginative tendencies in Dickens, demonstrating that a single-minded stress on the separation of Dickens' fictive world from our own slights the representational elements in his novels and their persistent claim that they are set in the real world. In the comparison of Our Mutual Friend and War and Peace with which his study begins Romano argues that novel realism itself, as a genre, consists not so much in verisimiltitude or typicality of detail as in a distictive formal quality: the openness of the novel to the world's uncertainty and chaos. It is the openness which Dickens the realist shares with such masters as Balzac and Tolstoy. Like theirs, his novels exhibit the disordering impact of social and historical actuality on the form of a work of art" - Publisher
Print Book, English, 1978
Columbia University Press, New York, 1978