VICTORIAN REALISM REVISITED IN MIN JIN LEE’S “FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES”
VICTORIAN REALISM REVISITED IN MIN JIN LEE’S “FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES”

Summary/Abstract: The author of this article addresses a question we often ask nowadays: is nineteenth century realism dead and forgotten or rather can we claim that it was revived and refined in the last decades? Min Jin Lee certainly demonstrates that realism, Victorian realism in particular, has survived for around two hundred years and that it reemerged ‘from its ashes’ in a new, exciting shape. The aim of this paper is primarily to point at common characteristics in novels like “Middlemarch” by George Eliot or “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte and Min Jin Lee’s “Free Food for Millionaires”. It ultimately endeavors to demonstrate that realism arose enriched and adapted to the life of a twenty-first century Dorothea Brook, or Jane Eyre. Casey Han, a Korean-American young woman, educated at Princeton, living in Elmhurst, strives to break the barriers of her modest origin just like famous Victorian heroines, but living in a completely ‘brave new world’.

• Details
• Contents