List of Illustrations ix
Notes on Contributors x

Foreword by Rachel Bowlby xiv

Acknowledgments xxii

Introduction: Reclaiming Realism 1
Matthew Beaumont

1 Literary Realism Reconsidered: "The world in its length and breadth" 13
George Levine

2 Realist Synthesis in the Nineteenth Century Novel: "The unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness" 23
Simon Dentith

3 Space, Mobility, and the Novel: "The spirit of place is a great reality" 50
Josephine McDonagh

4 Fictions of the Real: "All truth with malice in it" 68
Terry Eagleton

5 Naturalism: "Dirt and horror pure and simple" 86
Sally Ledger

6 Realism before and after Photography: "The fantastical form of a relation among things" 102
Nancy Armstrong

7 The Realist Aesthetic in Painting: "Serious and committed, ironic and brutal, sincere and full of poetry" 121
Andrew Hemingway

8 Interrupted Dialogues of Realism and Modernism: "The fact of new forms of life, already born and active" 143
Esther Leslie

9 Socialist Realism: "To depict reality in its revolutionary development" 160
Brandon Taylor

10 Realism, Modernism, and Photography: "At last, at last the mask has been torn away" 176
John Roberts

11 Cinematic Realism: "A recreation of the world in its own image" 195
Laura Marcus

12 The Current of Critical Irrealism: "A moonlit enchanted night" 211
Michael Lowy

13 Psychoanalysis and the Lacanian Real: "Strange shapes of the unwrapped primal world" 225
Slavoj Zizek

14 Feminist Theory and the Return of the Real: "What we really want most out of realism..." 242
Helen Small

15 Realism and Anti-Realism in Contemporary Philosophy: "What s truth got to do with it?" 259
Christopher Norris

Afterword: A note on literary realism 279
Fredric Jameson

Index 290