The Contradictions of Realism

In this book, Jameson examines the fertile tensions of the nineteenth-century realist novel through the texts of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot. The power of these novels stems from their ability to simultaneously sustain two opposing tendencies: the impulse of chronological narration and the impulse of scene description. The characteristic that both makes the great realists of the nineteenth century a "model" and renders them inimitable is their maintenance of the tension between these two impulses. However, this is not a "mastery" that can be sustained indefinitely; eventually, one pole or the other begins to dominate, and the realist novel tends towards dissolution. Jameson also surveys the two main tendencies that emerge within this dissolution process: on the one hand, modernism (e.g., Faulkner), and on the other, "popular" literature and melodrama, which continue the narrative patterns of old realism with the addition of some modernist flourishes.
In the second part of the book, a map of the current situation is drawn: a new global reality defined by high-tech wars is transforming the perception of history and time, pushing novelists to new experiments, which in turn leads subgenres such as historical novels or science fiction to transcend their narrow boundaries with a more holistic novelistic ambition.