Nineteenth-century realist novelists held an aesthetic commitment to society as stable Being

Evidence

What Lukacs called the great realists, that is, the principal realistic novelists of the nineteenth century, can be characterized in terms of a kind of aesthetic vested interest in Being itself (which is to say, in the apprehension of society as a form of stable Being), which, despite its convulsions and the inner rhythms of its lawful transformations, can somehow eventually be grasped as such and registered. However progressive some of them may have been, they therefore could, by virtue of their calling and their aesthetic, have no stake in a vision of the social world that allows for abrupt modifications and, as it were, dialectical transformations in the very laws of that order and its local form of “human nature.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 472

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ontological commitment of realism — society as stable Being — which is a key step in the periodization of styles.
• XREF: Connects to Lukacs’s theory of realism and anticipates the reader’s project of mapping how aesthetic form tracks economic stages.