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Parody and the Realist Novel

Whether we equate literary realism, in the conventional way, with the aesthetic aims of its practitioners, or define it, in a more recent fashion, by reference to mimetic strategies, the question of parody seems at first to be totally irrelevant. There can apparently be no use for intertextual exchanges in a theory which asserts an integral relationship between the text and the reality it purports to depict and which would confine the role of the writer to the unmediated observation and recording of empirical phenomena. The mid-nineteenth-century French realists, for example, advocated a total sincerity and spontaneity of vision, a view which seemed to leave no room for the play of parodic effects, for it sought to expunge systematically all traces of textuality from the process of literary composition. The realist aesthetic is presumably more than usually suppositious since its ultimate aim is an impossible assimilation of art and life. How can parody, one might ask, be at all apposite to so grave an ent...