Realism and the Institution of the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Abstract

This chapter argues that establishing an origin for what we now call ‘British realism’ or ‘the Irish novel’ is both an institutional and an anachronistic endeavour: the stories that we tell about novels are actually stories about the cultural institutions that study novels. Considering the formal and political divisions of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent alongside its changing critical reception, the chapter demonstrates how ‘British realism’ is an anachronistic formation and offers a new origin story where ‘British realism’ and ‘the Irish novel’ are not separate traditions or forms, but rather dynamically intertwined. Castle Rackrent, long thought to be an exemplary Irish novel precisely because it is not realist, develops realist contradictions that are taken up by later nineteenth-century Irish, Scottish and English novelists like Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope.