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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Andrzej Gasiorek, London, New York, Sydney, and Auckland: Edward Arnold, 1995. vi + 202 pp. $18.95 paper.
Anyone who writes about literary realism these days should probably invest in a stout suit of armor and a stalwart sense of humor. It is a subject that addresses the most profound concerns about literary study while arousing the most rancorous debate or the largest yawns. Its definition can never be agreed upon, students never quite see the point of raising it as an issue (It's, like, life, right?), and it is easy to agree wholeheartedly with Damian Grant when he suggests that realism "is a prodigy that most people feel they could well do without."(1) Yet here we are again. Andrzej Gasiorek, in Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After, has focused on the ways in which British novelists of the postwar period have engaged with, rejected, or extended realism. The subtitle is, in fact, misleading, because realism is not considered here to have an "after"; rather, it is a genre, school, style, or general mimetic orientation for all seasons.
In the late 1940s, a crisis was perceived in fiction. Between them, World War II and modernism had driven the novel into one of its periodic bouts with exhaustion. Modernist subjectivism, the shattering events of the war, and the turn by audiences to cinema and radio for their entertainment put pressure on novels and novelists. Having established that these social factors caused heated debate among writers and critics about the future of the novel, Gasiorek finds it "striking how persistently commentators linked the crisis of the novel with a crisis of society" (5). Why this is "striking" is not made clear, although it is apparent that writers were trying to find new ways to use the novel form, both in the immediate aftermath of the war and in the cultural economy of the 1950s and early 1960s.
In Britain, the campaign to revivify the novel divided into two camps: the realists (Kingsley Amis, William Cooper, C. P. Snow) and the experimentalists (Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson)....
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