Realism single work   essay  
Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Realism
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'‘My mind doesn’t work in those regions,’ Wallace Robson, my tutor at university, is reported to have said when asked about aesthetics. My own response was much the same when I was asked to contribute to a symposium on ‘Realism’. ‘Realism’ has never been something I have understood as an aesthetic or stylistic issue. It is more a moral issue. It represents a shorthand term for telling the truth in writing, which for me is what writing is about. Understanding, not mystification; discovery, not obfuscation. In part this has its aesthetic implications, a matter of seeing the object as it really is, describing characters as they really are. As they really are? Yes. For me the most interesting novels and stories are those that are based on real people rather than on fictional constructs. They are the ones I return to. When you read the work of Jack Kerouac or Christopher Isherwood or Katherine Mansfield or Anthony Powell or Christina Stead or Evelyn Waugh you are encountering characters drawn from the life, from observed experience. Of course some writers adapt the life models more than others. The strength of Christina Stead’s writing was the closeness of her observation: her characters were closely based on originals, and the wisdom and value of her work comes from the wisdom of her observations about people. Other writers will combine aspects of more than one person into a fictional figure. I have done this myself. The advantage is that you can always say that this character is a composite, not a libellous portrait. The disadvantage is that you can end up with someone like a police identikit portrait, someone who is a combination of known features yet unlike any known living being.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Wild about Books : Essays on Books and Writing Michael Wilding , Melbourne : Australian Scholarly Publishing , 2019 17393108 2019 selected work essay

    'Wild About Books – essays on books and writing, about reading them and writing them, and publishing them and collecting them and preserving them in libraries. Essays about the shared experience of literature, the art and craft of writing, the pleasures of reading, the survival of five hundred years of print culture, together with reflections and suggestions on creative writing, on what to do, and how to do it, and on what I’ve done, and why I wrote this book and how I wrote that one, together with anecdotes from other writers’ experiences, from writers in person, and from the books they have written.'

    Source: Publisher's blurb.

    Melbourne : Australian Scholarly Publishing , 2019
    pg. 8-15
Last amended 23 May 2023 07:25:22
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