Realism And Modernism In Madame Bovary And Anna Karenina

Abstract: Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina might belong to the genre of the novel of adultery and we could simply read them as a more or less vulgar story of a domestic betrayal within the range of the realistic novel. Running from desire for adventure to true love, adultery at first stands as liberation and after it has consumed its love parable, as guilt. Paralleling Wang Anyi’s Song of Everlasting Sorrows with Flaubert’s and Tolstoy’s work, we shall reconsider them as novel of disillusionment based on false fatalism and self-deception. This article suggests a theoretical arch linking up Western modern realism and Chinese postmodern realism into an ahistorical dimension of desperation.
Key words: Realism, Post-socialism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Anomie.

Overlapping Biographies My analytical conjecture focuses on three texts: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) and Wang Anyi’s Song of

To see the connection between Western Nineteenth-century fiction and Chinese Twenty-first century production we have to go back of half century. The answer is to be found in the essence of Maoism. The Western process of modernity is a line of action starting with the Age of Enlightenment, though the idea itself of progress, as a wave that keeps moving forward, plunges its very roots into the Jewish-Christian concept of time and blooms while the Renaissance discovers the world. However, taking the XVIII century as starting point, the achievements of the Enlightenment are undeniable: human personality, human rights, human freedom and the spectacle of technical progress will escort human beings to stand in focus providing condition for the developing of a Self. The historical result after Hegel and after Nietzsche has been Auschwitz.