Temporality and the Politics of Class in Nineteenth-Century Realism

Art with substantive realist resonance derives much of its impact from a capacity to visualize and bring to mind realities, social as well as more straightforwardly materialist, that matter to the larger world in which an artist lived. The present study addresses the temporal and imaginative complexities integral to the constitution of any realist art that has genuine traction. In so doing, it brings to the fore the alternatives that realist painting, particularly its “classic” nineteenth-century versions, offer to modern, and above all modernist, conceptions of realism as holding up for view a stilled moment from the ever-ongoing, ever-shifting, and on occasion rupturing dynamics of time. The analysis draws on literary theorizing of the temporalities of modern realism by figures such as Frederic Jameson.