The Truth of Realism

This book is about the power of narrative realism as a critique of the ideology of inwardness in the German-speaking world. It answers the question: What kind of truth about reality does German literary realism enable us to see, and what kind of transformation does that vision require and effect?
In his new book, Walker offers a radical reassessment of the German realist novel in the nineteenth century. Especially in the English- speaking world, German narrative realism has persistently been interpreted as the literary expression of an ideology of the aesthetic.