Realism and the Romantic Essay

This book discusses the importance of the Romantic essay to the development of realism in the Victorian era. It explores how specific texts by key Victorian authors—Dickens, Ruskin, Eliot, Pater, Hardy, and Stevenson—depart from the principles and practice of their forebears in prose: William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. Reviving, in its methodology, a now nearly obsolete critical mode, the source study, it tracks in the transition from essayists of the Romantic era to their Victorian successors, a changing relation between 'ideal' and 'real', or 'self' and 'other'. Naming as 'realism', an English literary practice of the nineteenth century that, mimetic in its expression, remains committed to the absolute and uncompromised reality of the other, it argues for the importance of the Romantic essay to the genesis and evolution of this practice.