Description
Book SynopsisIn The Chain of Things, Eric Downing shows how the connection between divinatory magic and reading shaped the experience of reading and aesthetics among nineteenth-century realists and modernist thinkers. He explores how writers, artists, and critics such as Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Walter Benjamin drew on the ancient practice of divination, connecting the Greek idea of sympathetic magic to the German aesthetic concept of the attunement of mood and atmosphere.
Downing deftly traces the genealogical connection between reading and art in classical antiquity, nineteenth-century realism, and modernism, attending to the ways in which the modern re-enchantment of the worldboth in nature and human societyconsciously engaged ancient practices that aimed at preternatural prediction. Of particular significance to the argument presented in The Chain of Things is how the future figured into the reading of texts during this period, a time when the future as a narrative determ
Trade Review
... this is a work of engaged and engaging criticism whose dis-disenchanting programme will move its readers to (re)visit not just the two target novels but, in principle, any other work marked 'realist.'
* MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *
By challenging the received historiographical and aesthetic notions that underpin the study of Realism by expanding our understanding of mimesis, rather than jettisoning it, Downing's work potently charges and expands many of the crucial concepts of both the field and its best-known authors. The Chain of Things gives scholars working in the field invaluable tools to approach some of the most difficult and intriguing questions of these difficult and intriguing texts.
* The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory *
