A Maggot y la herencia del realismo dieciochesco

Abstract

John Fowles pays in his latest novel, A Maggot, an intertextual homage to eighteenth-century realism and, more particularly, to one of its founders and supreme masters, Daniel Defoe. This essay tackles the meaning of realism that postmodern writing questions and thematizes parodically, bringing back to the surface one of the tenets of the realist philosophy: that realism is not reality, but a textual construct that, ever since its beginnings, proved to be ontologically hesitant. Thus, this paper will examine the different discourses that attach A Maggot to eighteenth- century realism and epistemology, disclosing simultaneously their alliance with the aesthetics of postmodern thought and expression.