Writing realism

"Writing Realism is a study of how readers can believe in the realism, if not the reality, of what they read, often despite overwhelming evidence of unreality. This persistence of the mimetic illusion is, Mortimer says, the magic of realism. Mortimer analyzes striking examples from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, examining works by Balzac, Diderot, Laclos, and Marguerite de Navarre and by contemporary writers Serge Doubrovsky and Philippe Sollers. Each of these texts allows Mortimer to explore how the mimetic illusion operates on readers, both in French literature and in…