In a famous passage in The Red and the Black, the French writer Stendhal described the novel as a mirror being carried along a roadway. In the twentieth century this was derided as a nave notion of realism. Instead, modern writers experimented with creative forms of invention and dislocation. Deconstructive theorists went even further, questioning whether literature had any real reference to a world outside its own language, while traditional historians challenged whether novels gave a trustworthy representation of history and society. In this book, Morris Dickstein reinterprets Stendhal's metaphor and tracks the different worlds of a wide array of twentieth-century writers, from realists like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, through modernists like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, to wildly inventive postwar writers like Saul Bellow, Gnter Grass, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Philip Roth, and Gabriel Garca Mrquez. Dickstein argues that fiction will always yield rich insight into its subject, and that literature can also be a form of historical understanding. Writers refract the world through their forms and sensibilities. He shows how the work of these writers recaptures--yet also transforms--the life around them, the world inside them, and the universe of language and feeling they share with their readers. Through lively and incisive essays directed to general readers as well as students of literature, Dickstein redefines the literary landscape--a landscape in which reading has for decades been devalued by society and distorted by theory. Having begun with a reconsideration of realism, the book concludes with several essays probing the strengths and limitations of a historical approach to literature and criticism.

莫裏斯·迪剋斯坦是紐約城市大學研究生部的英語教授，著作頗豐的文學和文化批評傢。其作品曾發錶於《紐約時代周刊書評》、《泰晤士報文學副刊》、《黨派評論》、《國傢》和《高等教育年鑒》。其著作包括曾被提名美國國傢圖書奬的《伊甸園之門：六十年代美國文化》，以及研究戰後美國小說的《殿堂中的獵豹》。