Realist Vision Peter Brooks

"Realist Vision" explores the claim to represent the world 'as it is'. Peter Brooks takes a new look at the realist tradition and its intense interest in the visual. Discussing major English and French novels and paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brooks provides a lively and perceptive view of the realist project.Centering each chapter on a single novel or group of paintings, Brooks examines the 'invention' of realism beginning with Balzac and Dickens, its apogee in the work of such as Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola, and its continuing force in James and modernists such as Woolf. He considers also the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud, and such recent phenomena as 'photorealism' and 'reality TV'.

Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University. He is author or editor of more than a dozen books, among them Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture; Law's Stories; and The Melodramatic Imagination, which are available from Yale University Press.

"'A fine new book... An excellent book.' James Wood, New Republic 'The readings are always acute and suggestive.' Elizabeth Helsinger, Studies in English Literature 'With Realist Vision, Peter Brooks directs his gaze at some of the most remarkable works of realism and offers a spirited appreciation of the genre and its efforts to represent the truth of modern life in society... Because Realist Vision was conceived as a lecture series, its chapters have a spoken quality that invites readers of differing expertise into them.' Larry T. Shillock, Bloomsbury Review"