Narrating Reality

Harry E. Shaw is Senior Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at Cornell University. He is author of The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (also from Cornell) and editor of Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels.

This is a powerfully integrative book.... Narrating Reality is... as much a dramatic exercise in critical self-scrutiny as it is an analysis of a literary tradition... A remarkable, often moving book.- Andrew H. Miller, Indiana University (Victorian Studies) This work is a classic example of statement and amplification: the notion of realism is the focus, the examination of the works of Austen, Scott, and Eliot the demonstration of that idea. The book is judicious, balanced, tightly structured, and tremendously informed.... With a sharply defined focus and a lucid, close-to-informal style, Shaw adeptly leads his reader through what can easily be a bewildering and overlapping maze of narratological theories.... A significant and original analysis.(Choice)