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Confronted with apartheid, dictatorship or the sheer scale of global economics, realism can no longer function with the certainties of the nineteenth century. Free Realist Style considers how the style of the realist novel changes as its epistemological horizons narrow.

The comics anthologies Ally Sloper and Escape magazine began publication in the 1970s and 1980s. They inherited a complex national situation, one in which locally produced comics always had to compete with foreign imports, primarily superhero comics from the United States. Each of these pioneering anthologies sought to create a space for small press and independent English comics and a wider sense of the history and potential of the medium, but in doing so, they had to negotiate a history and market shaped by the consumption of comics from the United States. Placing the anthologies within this larger situation, this article interprets the work of these various editors in terms of the national and cosmopolitan strategies they deployed as they sought to further develop English comics.

Johann Gottfried von Herder has been unevenly received in recent years: postcolonial theorists have regarded his philosophy primarily for its contribution to nationalism and anthropology, while scholars in comparative literature have noted his importance to philology and the concept of world literature. This essay argues that these contradictory readings may be resolved and, indeed, a very timely set of theoretical animadversions may be reclaimed, by turning to Herder’s early works such as “Fragments on Recent German Literature” and “This Too a Philosophy for the History of Mankind.” In these works, the young Herder developed a highly original philosophy of language, rejected the principle of linguistic arbitrariness, and set afoot philology as a historically situated, transnational study of literary and cultural development. Moreover, the young Herder mounted a vociferous critique of colonialism for its economic rapacity and human destructiveness. His thought thus evinces the strong associations between anticolonialism, philology, and materialist critique.

The form of nineteenth-century realism offers no simple way to map an ever more complex world-system: the old conventions could portray an industrial town, but are hardly suitable to narrating the operations of the World Bank. And yet, postcolonial writers often show a pugnacious drive to build a cognitive map of their worlds. Recuperating Georg Lukacs’ expectation of a new, experimental realism, this chapter argues for the formal inventiveness of these postcolonial writers. Employing modernist techniques and a realist’s desire to chart social totalities, writers such as Peter Abrahams, George Lamming, Nuruddin Farah, and Zoe Wicomb create an original peripheral realism.

Nuruddin Farahs Sweet and Sour Milk responds to the inverted order of African dictatorship. For where the nineteenth-century novelist observed social life, the Somali intellectual is observed by the postcolonial state.Farah elaborates a literary form that seeks to map this inversion: his characters are beleaguered social scientists and dissident intellectuals who seek a social knowledge hidden by the state. Sweet and Sour Milk embraces a modernist experimentalism, not to valorize the erosion of knowledge, but to critique the absence of hard facts and sociological data. Farah reinvents realism for the African novel, pugnaciously mapping what the dictatorship would conceal.

The experimental realism of Zoe Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town unfolds through an interplay of realistic social survey and modernist self-reflexivity. At times the novel maps the compartmentalized society of Apartheid South Africa; at times, the narrative turns back to focus on its own narrative protocols and the dubious veracity of literary language. In this chapter, I argue that the novel’s experimental realism not only employs such contradictions, but also moves beyond them toward a different state of language, a future political and linguistic transparency and open discourse. In this new language (what Jacques Ranciere calls “accompaniment”), Wicomb hints at a possible future of the postcolonial novel and a more perfect realism to come.

In The Emigrants, George Lamming experimented with the form of the novel as he sought to portray an original historical experience: the immigration of Caribbean peoples to Britain. This chapter argues that The Emigrants employs modernist techniques in support of a fundamentally realistic drive to map social life. Moving from the flutters of consciousness to an assured detailing of milieu and social forces, Lamming reinvents realism for the Empire Windrush generation. In doing so, The Emigrants demonstrates the possibilities for realist experiment in postcolonial and Black British literature.