Download or read book The Realistic Imagination written by George Levine and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Realistic Imagination, George Levine argues that the Victorian realists and the later modernists were in fact doing similar things in their fiction: they were trying to use language to get beyond language. Levine sees the history of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel as a continuing process in which each generation of writers struggled to escape the grip of convention and attempted to create new language to express their particular sense of reality. As these attempts hardened into new conventions, they generated new attempts to break free.