AESTHETIC REALISM IN LITERATURE SERIAL

Scholars in various fields have begun to hold that while realist narrative responds to capitalist permutations across space and time, it is-for that very reason-a transnational medium shot through with aesthetic possibility. But realist fiction-in dialogue with the realisms of photography, film, television, and other media-has lived to tell another tale.

Realist fiction has been an object of fascinated suspicion since the late-nineteenth century: modernists, structuralists, poststructuralists, and Marxists are among those to have characterized the realist novel as aesthetically bland and/or ideologically reactionary. Olsen and Will Scheffer's HBO show Big Love.

Delineating and comparing two such periods-'the long 1860s' and 'the long 2000s'-this essay explores three axes of enlargement: from the Bigger Methods of the Annales School to the Bigger Stories and Bigger Houses at work in Anthony Trollope's serialized Barsetshire novels and millennial television series such as Mark V. The 'Bigger Love' described in this essay is a serialized structure and structure of feeling born of 'quality' modes of production and reception during two 'golden ages'-both of which coincided with periods of advancing capitalist financialization.

AESTHETIC REALISM IN LITERATURE SERIAL

Comparative study of mid-Victorian-era and turn-of-the-millennium serial cultures can show how these narratives negotiate the transitions between productive and financial economies which recur within 'long centuries' that otherwise differ. To a greater extent than any short-form medium, serialized narratives create real-life and often shared experiences of inhabiting worlds whose long-evolving plotlines and unwieldy meanings defy our cravings for knowledge and plenitude.

Aesthetic realism in literature