A Literary Review of Neorealism in British and American Literature

In the wake of postmodernism, writers sit at an anxious crossroads where the language representation of postmodernism meets the lyrical realism of Balzac and Flaubert, and a few critics have attempted to anchor a realist grounding for the new directions of novels. In this sense, the appeal of the return of realism is recognized as congenial to experimental realism—neorealism, embodying experiments in forms, styles, and modes of valuing, with mimesis dominant. Entering the 21 st century, neorealism has won certain celebrations from some Chinese scholars, but its descriptions, designations, and practices in British and American literature display some confusion and ambiguity that revolve around the present studies of neorealism in China. This paper, thus, aims to solve these questions by exploring its cause and effect, and pointing out the research gap between foreign scholars and Chinese, likewise with an attempt to provide an individual but academic description of this new form. It concludes that neorealism is a new form of realism in the postmodern context, integrating the self-consciousness of modernism and language dominant of postmodernism, with an attempt to articulate and evaluate the relationships between the individual self and “signified” social reality in the textualized world. In the postmodern context, multiple worlds are textualized in fiction and the reality is not absolute but the “signified” one understood by the majority. The major concerns of British neorealism fiction reside more in “self” due to its British tradition of (liberal) humanity, different from American neorealism with politics dominant

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · International relations · Literature · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Realism · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Law · Philosophy

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