Literary realism, that is, texts that seek to represent the actual in literature while achieving a sense of verisimilitude, have historically been analyzed and defined by a number of critics. These critics have, with differing approaches, attempted to make comprehensible what it is that constitutes the realist text. In their process of doing so, many have dismantled this specific category of text and isolated its distinguishing components. This study has sought to challenge and elaborate on three of the most influential, scholarly voices that have articulated such ideas about the realist text: Ian Watt, Eric Auerbach and Roland Barthes. The purpose has been to add to this field of knowledge by increasing our understanding of what it is that constitutes literary realism. This has been done by analyzing three realist works that have been previously examined by these critics, and then, by studying two further realist works, more recent in time. These works are, in the order that they have been approached and analyzed: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (Published in 1722), Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart (Published in 1877), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (Published in 1925), Melina Marchetta’s Jellicoe Road (Published in 2006) and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Published in 2022). As a result, the study has found that technology is a recurring textual element that functions as a coherence-making narrative device in these realist texts, and as a consequence, has laid bare a blind spot in these above-mentioned critics’ definitions of literary realism. Thus, the study suggests that technology should be understood as a distinguishing element in the literary text. The selection of works has, in turn, allowed for the study to both compare and contrast these texts, and to trace the effect that the technological development in the reality preceding the literary text can be said to have on these texts themselves. Here, the study has found that new technologies in the reality preceding the text often occur as new coherence-making textual devices in these literary works, and thus, that the technological development in the actual affects the realist text itself.

This essay explores the different levels of scale used in Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory. The central thesis of this essay, “The Novel on a New Scale: Considering the World in a Tree’s Lifetime,” examines the different levels of scale, from the general concept to the particular scale of the novel as a medium, as well as the spatial and temporal scales of human and non-human entities in The Overstory. This exploration unfolds through four sections, each with its own sub-sections: Scale, History to Fiction, The Character and the Decentering of the Human, and the Temporal Scale.            By examining how The Overstory tackles the challenges of operating on multiple scales to provide an authentic narrative, this essay contributes to the emerging field of Anthropocene fiction. It further emphasizes the need to acknowledge multiple scales both as authors and readers, as they inherit the power to shift perspectives. Richard Powers is a novelist who successfully brings the natural world closer to his readers while truthfully addressing the critical issues of climate change and deforestation.