Current Events > Any literary CEmen? I need to write whether Hard Times is realist.

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's just one page but I'm behind on the video lectures so my grasp on Realist art is shaky. I recognize the argument can go both ways but it seems to me that Hard Times bucks the trends of Realist literature. I mean sure, someone like Sissy Jupe is a very mundane person to center a story, but so many of these characters are downright fantastical, from the egos and lack of self-awareness from Gradgrind and Boundberry to the whimsical and words-slurring Sleary. Perhaps more importantly, Dickens doesn't use Realist prose at all to my understanding. He's super liberal with his use of figurative language to dress up the characters. From the first page: "The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellerage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knots, like the crust of a plum-pie"

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