Coming to prominence with the 19th-century novel, literary realism has most often been associated with the insistence that art cannot turn away from the more sordid and harsh aspects of human existence. This volume offers a clear, reader-friendly guide to debates around realism.

Coming to prominence with the nineteenth-century novel, literary realism has most often been associated with the insistence that art cannot turn away from the more sordid and harsh aspects of human existence. However, because realism is unavoidably tied up with the gnarly concept of 'reality' and 'the real', it has been one of the most widely debated terms in the New Critical Idiom series.
This volume offers a clear, reader-friendly guide to debates around realism, examining:
*ideas of realism in nineteenth-century French and British fiction
*the twentieth-century formalist...

In this clear, user-friendly guide, Claire Colebrook provides an historical and theoretical overview of irony, tracing its development from Socrates to the 21st century, and explores the challenge that irony presents to communication and representation in literature.

Ecocriticism explores the ways in which we imagine the relationship between humans and the environment across many areas of cultural production, including Romantic poetry, wildlife documentaries, climate models, the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, and novels by Margaret Atwood, Kim Scott, Barbara Kingsolver and Octavia Butler.