This work is a classic example of statement and amplification: the notion of realism is the focus, the examination of the works of Austen, Scott, and Eliot the demonstration of that idea. The book is judicious, balanced, tightly structured, and tremendously informed.... With a sharply defined focus and a lucid, close-to-informal style, Shaw adeptly leads his reader through what can ... Read moreeasily be a bewildering and overlapping maze of narratological theories.... A significant and original analysis.
Choice
This is a powerfully integrative book.... Narrating Reality is... as much a dramatic exercise in critical self-scrutiny as it is an analysis of a literary tradition... A remarkable, often moving book.
Andrew H. Miller, Indiana University
Victorian Studies
Narrating Reality generates an original and affirmative account about nineteenth-century realism. Harry E. Shaw's contentions about realism are extremely provocative, and are targeted very effectively against the dominant critical positions on realism of our times. Shaw incorporates the most important texts on realism written over the past hundred years, while also ranging broadly over philosophical and theoretical works. The book applies its affirmative perspective on realism to three novelists in ways that both illustrate the tenets of the main argument while also advancing it in important new directions. All in all, Shaw's analysis is more rigorous and more clarifying than anything I have read on the subject in the last ten or fifteen years. It is without question the most original defense of realism I have come across in a long time.
John Kucich, University of Michigan Show Less