Narrating Reality offers a provocative and original critique of nineteenth-century British realist fiction and our ways of understanding it. Paying close attention to the role of the narrator, Harry E. Shaw challenges the denigration of realism that has become a critical orthodoxy in recent decades.

Drawing on such thinkers as Erich Auerbach, Jürgen Habermas, and J. L. Austin, Shaw contends that realist novels claim not to replicate the world in their pages or to offer transparent access to it, but to involve readers in a process of narrative understanding adequate to grasping the complexities of life in history. Seen in this light, the works of such novelists as Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and George Eliot, as they depict their own and other cultures and strive to imagine regions of freedom in the dense and constricting web of history, gain a new interest.

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 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.

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.