Introduction: Documentary Realism

Abstract

Although the traditional realistic novel has been pronounced dead on several occasions since the modernist break-through in the 1920s, it has shown a viability which must be surprising to those who have busied themselves predicting its demise. Traditional realism is the narrative mode of all kinds of entertainment fiction ranging from run-of-the-mill magazine stories written by anonymous authorial collectives to the verbal products intended directly for the bestseller lists by such established ‘popular’ writers as Harold Robbins, Arthur Hailey, or Barbara Cartland. Furthermore the greater part of ‘serious’ / ‘artistic’ / ‘literary’ fiction employs this pre-modernist narrative mode, which assumes that there is an extra-literary reality which may be verbally communicated, and that it is possible and indeed valid to create self-sustaining fictional universes existing on the basis of analogy with experiential reality.¹