Renaissance Realism, by Alastair Fowler

CITATION: Fowler, Alastair. Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Understanding

• Question: How did Renaissance narrative anticipate realism?
• Answer:  Mimetic time, space, and identification were not confined to a point of perspective or representation, and were instead united by moralistic or allegorical themes.
• Method: While comparing drama, poetry, and visual art, Fowler separately approaches the issues of space, event, sequence, allegory, spectacle, and character; and lastly applies a combined approach to The Faerie Queene and Hamlet.
• Assumptions: Fowler responds to a tradition of literary criticism that treats novelistic realism as the true essence of realism, only accessible through the revival of classical unities. He includes visual art in his analysis because he claims it was intelligible with visual art in the Renaissance. Lastly, Fowler acknowledges that he interprets visual art only to understand visual imagination, rather than engaging with his selection in other modes.
• Sententiae: "Free temporal movement; empathy with the outer world; spectatorial involvement: all were still possible."

Overstanding

• Assessment: Fowler makes an important contribution to integrating early modern text and image, even if he makes on contributions to the early modern conception of narrative. Fowler draws in image on the basis of a "know it when I see it" approach to narrative, and totally disregards the images' stories in favor of discourse. In some schools of narrative theory, narrative occurs in the distance between tenor and vehicle, story and discourse: Fowler unknowingly naturalizes this assumption when he selects narrative images without examining his heuristics, or more importantly, when he describes Renaissance mimesis as doubly representative allegorically structured.
• Synthesis: On the one hand, Fowler's analysis seems cut against the grain of Chartier's central argument. Chartier argues that books and surrounding concepts (the author, the library) have been socially constructed throughout history. Fowler, on the other hand, treats realism and narrative as though they were codes independent of form or history.
  On the other hand, Fowler selects images and texts in a way that breaks out of several of the generic lines that Chartier might be concerned with deconstructing.
• Application: The application might be the slipperiest part of this. If the Renaissance conception of mimesis includes allegorical structure, then it's much harder to discern what's mimetic and what's not: because every instance of representation might be superimposed with a second representation, or because every instance of high-fallutin' symbolism might draw in a handful of accurate representations (eg Epicene).