Table Of ContentWhatever happened to realism? What form is adequate to representing
our moment, situated as we are after the end of ‘the end of History’? In the F
o
face of youth revolts and workers’ insurgencies from Cairo to London, it
r Forecasts of the Past
seems a good time to test the possibilities of alternative Marxist defences
e
of contemporary realist fiction. Can realism’s techniques adequately c
represent the complexity of contemporary political organisation? This book a
reads key realist texts from recent decades in order to test their potential s Globalisation, History, Realism, Utopia
t
to produce the knowledge of history, industrial politics and the metropolis s
traditionally central to literary realism’s concerns. Positioning himself within o
and against the inspiration and models of Fredric Jameson’s literary theory, f
and drawing on innovative realist texts, the author seeks to draw the t
classic realism controversies of an earlier period in historical materialism h
into productive conversation with the debates framing the era of austerity. e
P
a
This boldly original book argues that realism has been the missing element in
s
the post-globalisation revival of Marxism. McNeill sets out both to defend the t
desirability and chart the development of a truly contemporary realism, as he finds
it in novels drawn from England, Scotland, Germany and New Zealand. This new
•
realism will be emergent and oppositional, in Raymond Williams’s terms, rather
than dominant. And, unlike earlier Lukácsian theories, this new realist aesthetic
D
will decline to polemicise against other genres, preferring to form a ‘readerly united
o
front’ against the reifications of globalisation, alongside the future-investigations
u
of cyberpunk and science fiction and the ideological interrogations of metafiction.
g
This truly remarkable book promises to conjoin ontologies of the present and a
forecasts of the past to Jameson’s archaeologies of the future. l
— Professor Andrew Milner, Monash University, Melbourne M
c
N
e
Dougal McNeill teaches postcolonial literature and science fiction in the i
l Dougal McNeill
School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University l
of Wellington, New Zealand. He has published on Scottish literature,
Marxist theory and literary imaginings of Japan, and is the author of The
Many Lives of Galileo (2005).
ISBN 978-3-0343-0875-5
www.peterlang.com Peter Lang
Whatever happened to realism? What form is adequate to representing
our moment, situated as we are after the end of ‘the end of History’? In the F
o
face of youth revolts and workers’ insurgencies from Cairo to London, it
r Forecasts of the Past
seems a good time to test the possibilities of alternative Marxist defences
e
of contemporary realist fiction. Can realism’s techniques adequately c
represent the complexity of contemporary political organisation? This book a
reads key realist texts from recent decades in order to test their potential s Globalisation, History, Realism, Utopia
t
to produce the knowledge of history, industrial politics and the metropolis s
traditionally central to literary realism’s concerns. Positioning himself within o
and against the inspiration and models of Fredric Jameson’s literary theory, f
and drawing on innovative realist texts, the author seeks to draw the t
classic realism controversies of an earlier period in historical materialism h
into productive conversation with the debates framing the era of austerity. e
P
a
This boldly original book argues that realism has been the missing element in
s
the post-globalisation revival of Marxism. McNeill sets out both to defend the t
desirability and chart the development of a truly contemporary realism, as he finds
it in novels drawn from England, Scotland, Germany and New Zealand. This new
•
realism will be emergent and oppositional, in Raymond Williams’s terms, rather
than dominant. And, unlike earlier Lukácsian theories, this new realist aesthetic
D
will decline to polemicise against other genres, preferring to form a ‘readerly united
o
front’ against the reifications of globalisation, alongside the future-investigations
u
of cyberpunk and science fiction and the ideological interrogations of metafiction.
g
This truly remarkable book promises to conjoin ontologies of the present and a
forecasts of the past to Jameson’s archaeologies of the future. l
— Professor Andrew Milner, Monash University, Melbourne M
c
N
e
Dougal McNeill teaches postcolonial literature and science fiction in the i
l Dougal McNeill
School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University l
of Wellington, New Zealand. He has published on Scottish literature,
Marxist theory and literary imaginings of Japan, and is the author of The
Many Lives of Galileo (2005).
www.peterlang.com Peter Lang
Forecasts of the Past
Forecasts of the Past
Globalisation, History, Realism, Utopia
Dougal McNeill
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
McNeill, Dougal, 1981–
Forecasts of the past : globalisation, history, realism, utopia /
Dougal McNeill.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0875-5 (alk. paper)
1. Realism in literature. 2. Literature and globalization. I. Title.
PN56.R3M375 2012
809’.912--dc23
2012021927
isbn 978-3-0343-0875-5 (print)
isbn 978-3-0353-0339-1 (eBook)
Cover image provided by Gemma Lewis
Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2012
Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
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Printed in Germany
For
Ben Hillier, James Plested, Liz Ross
So keep your powder dry – hold your head up high
Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for explor-
ing the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experiences as the
ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to
approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not
be afraid to turn again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one
scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself
is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous
examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth:
the images, severed from all earlier associations that stand – like precious
fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery – in the prosaic room of our
later understanding.
— Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ (1932)
