SOURCE: "The Revenge of the Material," in Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Cornell University Press, 1984, pp. 65-83.

In the following excerpt, Vernon discusses money in terms of its physical existence and its existence as an abstraction, a social power which characters will do anything to gain but which novelists usually strip from them in the end.

When members of a culture slip easily into the perspective that enables them to recognize that land and great houses, whatever else they may be, are also dirt and wood and stone, literary realism becomes possible. Realism occurs when the social world undergoes a gradual erosion by the material, a process historically set in motion by the Industrial Revolution and the forms of money that accompanied it. In this chapter … I shall attempt to approach a definition of literary realism … by way of the image...