Authors

Discussion

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.