Romanticism, Realism and the Lines of Mimesis
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19th-century literature
A01=Polly Dickson
Author_Polly Dickson
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Category=DSBF
Category=DSM
comparative literature
E. T. A.
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Hoffmann
Honore de Balzac
mimesis
Realism
Romanticism
Product details
- ISBN 9781399506519
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Since Plato’s Republic, mimesis — the artwork’s tacit claim to reflect or imitate real life — has faced a near-constant stream of assaults, being accused of naturalising a supposedly uncomplicated relationship between world and fiction. Lines of Mimesis offers a revisionary account of mimesis. Specifically, it proposes a rethinking of the representational attitudes of two literary schools usually understood to be at odds with one another — Romanticism and Realism — through close readings of writings and drawings made by two figures usually taken to be proponents of those schools respectively: E. T. A. Hoffmann and Honoré de Balzac. Across these readings, Dickson argues that a more capacious understanding of mimesis is achieved when we understand it to pertain not to the reduplication of objects in the world, but to a negotiation of the subject’s sensory entwinement with those objects. This new understanding can, in turn, more closely illuminate an artwork’s own reflections on its relationship to the world, shedding light on the entanglements and crossovers between Romanticism and Realism.
Polly Dickson is Assistant Professor in German at Durham University. She works primarily on nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures, with particular interests in realism and in authors’ doodles.
