How to Study Literary Realism as Archive Art? The Case of Charles Dickens' Later Novels

Abstract

The paper proposes to approach the issue of literary realism through the prism of archive art, i.e. the artworks that are archives of objects, documents, statements, even other artworks by other artists etc. The preservation of the otherness of an entity, which is subsequently taken up and kept in an archive, is one of the key challenges involved in such projects. The second task of an archival artwork is to construct—in fact add—an encompassing totality that correlates with the authorship and gives significance to the archive-artwork as a whole. The paper scrutinizes possible links between the archival approaches to art production in the 20^th and 21^st centuries and the practices of realist writing beginning in the 19^th century.