Abstract

Just as the nineteenth-century American novel is vexed in its search for realism as distinct from romance, so too novel theory grapples with the relation of realism to romance. Henry James in his novelistic practice and Fredric Jameson in his critical and theoretical innovations recognize that the novel’s adherence to realism not only separates it from romance but also constitutively incorporates romance. A reflection on James’s moral realism over against Jameson’s changing conception of the realism-romance relation from The Political Unconscious through Postmodernism to The Antinomies of Realism brings to light how central and unsettled this fundamental problematic remains.

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