How does literature evoke reality? This book takes cues from the history of scientific observation to provide a new approach to this longstanding question of literary studies. It reconstructs a narrative technique of 'literary' observation in which reality appears by mimicking processes of visual perception, and it traces the functioning of this technique through a wide range of European fiction from the early 18th to the late 19th centuries.

Autorentext

How can literature show us a world that appears 'real'?
The basic premise of this book is that literature, in order to achieve this goal, has to emulate the way we experience the world visually, bringing curious objects to our attention and showing us how these objects develop over time. In terms of narratology, this means that literature must find ways to combine a vivid description of new images with a narrative in which these images are set in motion. This book thus moves beyond established approaches that associate realism's visuality with description alone to argue that the imitation of visual perception is the product precisely of the combination of description with narration - a technique introduced here as literary observation. Through readings of European fiction from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, this book explores how this technique is supported - and complicated - by a range of cultural and literary expectations.
Combining recent work in the history of knowledge with traditional questions of literary theory, The Narratology of Observation expands the conceptual vocabulary for analyzing fiction and offers new insights into the study of European realism.

Klappentext

This new series presents original scholarly and essayistic work addressing the central status of literature in and for the human sciences. At stake in the monographs and essay collections are paradigms of literary forms for thinking the human sciences: the knowledge involved in a literary work; how modes of reading and writing shape and depend on an epoch or area of thinking; literature's affinities and points of resistance to what we call the humanities and the sciences. In other words, the series examines how literature works with and upon philosophy, rhetoric, technology, anthropology, sociology, statistics, economics, history, experimental science, mathematics etc. Paradigms is primarily concerned with German letters, but also includes its European and comparative literary contexts. All volumes will be published in English and are first reviewed by the series editors followed by a peer review from two academics in the particular area of specialization. Two to four volumes are planned annually. Editors Rüdiger Campe (Yale University, New Haven CT) Karen S. Feldman (University of California, Berkeley) Editorial Board Paul Fleming (Cornell University) Eva Geulen (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin) Rüdiger Görner (Queen Mary, University of London) Barbara Hahn (Vanderbilt University) Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University) Helmut Müller-Sievers (University of Colorado at Boulder) William Rasch (Indiana University, Bloomington) Joseph Vogl (Humboldt University, Berlin) Elisabeth Weber (University of California, Santa Barbara) Submission Format The series accepts monographs and edited volumes, if they systematically approach a specific topic and show a high level of coherence and focus. Please submit an abstract and table of contents with narrative description of each chapter (4 5 pages total, single-spaced) as well as a CV along with the complete manuscript. Only complete manuscripts can be evaluated. In exceptional cases, abstracts or outlines can be submitted to discuss the general fit of a book with the series editors. Please understand that a final commitment for publication can only be reached on the basis of a complete manuscript. Manuscripts should have a minimum length of circa 200 pages (approximately 500,000 characters including spaces). Please submit your abstract, table of contents, and CV as one file; the complete manuscript as a second file to Dr. Myrto Aspioti: myrto.aspioti@degruyter.com.