The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms

Realism is an artistic practice that aims to faithfully represent reality. Historically, it has been practiced across different media, from early pictorial art and epic oral narratives, through literature and visual arts, to film, music, and digital media. However, an understanding of what it means to ＂faithfully represent reality＂ is not universal; rather, it varies from culture to culture. The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms brings the diversity of global realisms - literary, visual, sonic, dramatic, and digital; Victorian and modernist; socialist, capitalist, magical and marvelous, postcolonial, environmental, and posthuman - to the fore. By foregrounding theories, practices, and forms of realism that are less well-known to Anglophone readers than ＂classic＂ realisms, The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms revises the Eurocentric geography of the concept. It offers a broad chronology that overcomes the habitual fixation in studies of realism on the nineteenth century as its starting point and offers, instead, a more flexible timeline of this artistic practice. The Handbook’s four sections ＂Theories of Global Realism,＂ ＂Practices of Global Realisms,＂ ＂Global Realisms and the Novel,＂ and ＂Intermedial Global Realisms＂ present realism as a transnational, transhistorical, and intermedial global phenomenon. The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms offers a global view of realism through contextualized case studies, showcasing previously underrepresented and marginalized theories, practices, forms, and media of realist cultural production.

Katherine Bowers is Associate Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Bowers’s research considers questions of literary form and genre. Her first monograph, Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic (2022), examines the ways European gothic fiction influenced the development of Russian realism. Her published work spans literary and media studies, digital humanities, and environmental humanities, as well as four co-edited volumes on topics in Russian literary and cultural history.

Margarita Vaysman is Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century Russophone Literature and Thought and Fellow in Russian at New College, University of Oxford. Her first monograph Self-Conscious Realism: Metafiction and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel was published in 2021. In 2020, Vaysman co-edited a volume Nineteenth-Century Russian Realism: Society, Knowledge, Narrative , which showcased the new interdisciplinary, inclusive approaches to the Russian realist canon. Her research focuses on literary texts, primarily the realist novel, and history of gender and sexuality.