Nineteenth-century French Realism specializes in metropolitan France, with Paris as its undisputed center. via Jennifer Yee's shut interpreting of the good novelists of the French realist and naturalist canon - Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant - The Colonial Comedy finds that the colonies play a job at a distance even within the such a lot it appears metropolitan texts. In what Edward acknowledged referred to as 'geographical notations' of race and imperialism the presence of the
colonies off-stage is clear as imported items, colonial item, and contributors whose colonial event is transformative. certainly, the realist novel registers the presence of the rising worldwide world-system via networks of importation, monetary hypothesis, and immigration in addition to direct
colonial violence and gear buildings. The literature of the century responds to the final many years of French slavery, and direct colonialism (notably in Algeria), but in addition monetary imperialism and the extension of French effect somewhere else. faraway from imperialist triumphalism, within the realist novel unique gadgets are portrayed as pretend or industrially produced for the becoming bourgeois marketplace, whereas fiscal imperialism is linked to fraud and manipulation. The planned distinction of colonialism and
exoticism in the metropolitan novel, and ironic distancing of colonial narratives, demonstrate the realist mode to be able to wondering its personal epistemological foundation. The Colonial Comedy argues for the life within the 19th century of a serious Orientalism characterised by means of critique of its
own discursive foundations.
Using the instruments of literary research inside of a materialist technique, The Colonial Comedy opens up the household Paris-Provinces axis to signifying chains pointing in the direction of the colonial space.