"The Antinomies of Realism "is a history ofthe nineteenth-century realist novel
and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements tha
t the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, To
lstoy, PErez GaldOs, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable,
yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since str
uggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history
of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution
to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narrat
ives - what today's book reviewers dub "serious novels," which are an attempt at
the impossible endeavor to roll back the past.
