Realism In Literature

The belief in the Enlightenment had become the clichés of bourgeois rationalism, literary realism then, even though obsessed with details, moves from a broader historical perspective, it responds to the larger European’s quest for rationality, which is the attempt to understand the underlining forces of the existence that Romanticism had explained with God. In this sense Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is likely to be considered the founder of the modern novel, the triumphs and defeats of an individual who is not the product of divine intervention but an ordinary man. Realism pushes literature up to new standards developing different narrative devices, so we have the sentimental novel (Austen) stressing the importance of sensibility,

Notwithstanding geographical and epochal distances, to see the connection between Western Nineteenth-century fiction and Chinese Twenty-first-century production, we have to go back to 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 Renaissance and elapsing in the Age of Enlightenment, whose achievements are undeniable: human personality, human rights, human freedom and the spectacle of technical progress escorting human beings to stand in focus providing conditions for the development of a Self. The historical result after Hegel and after Nietzsche has been Auschwitz. Postmodernity established itself as a dominant paradigm soon after WWII as a moment of rupture and continuity with the past, it is the representation of the world after it collapsed. The case of China is very much different indeed. Modernity in China hasn’t been an experience of Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, but a moment of colonialism from the outside and repression from the inside. Consequently, Postmodernity in China confronts a historical legacy different from the Western counterparts, it is not quite the end of modernity but the very beginning. From here the production of a narrative that regardless its intellectual labels, in post-Maoist decades, and all the more since 1989, stylistically and ontologically borders, depending on the authors, the totality of European realism, and the fragmentation of modernism. Post 1989 narrative enters a new dimension of Chinese modernity where time is up to come to terms with history. As European modern realism benched romantic idealization of nature and life to place back in the middle the rational, scientific, Voltairrian traditions, so did China with the excess of Maoism to