A concise companion to realism

Foreword / Rachel Bowlby

Introduction : reclaiming realism / Matthew Beaumont

Literary realism reconsidered : the world in its length and breadth / George Levine

Realist synthesis in the nineteenth-century novel : "that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness" / Simon Dentith

Space, mobility, and the novel : "the spirit of place is a great reality" / Josephine McDonagh

Fictions of the real : "all truth with malice in it" / Terry Eagleton

Naturalism : "dirt and horror pure and simple" / Sally Ledger

Realism before and after photography : "the fantastical form of a relation among things" / Nancy Armstrong

The realist aesthetic in painting : "serious and committed, ironic and brutal, sincere and full of poetry" / Andrew Hemingway

Interrupted dialogues of realism and modernism : "the fact of new forms of life, already born and active" / Esther Leslie

Socialist realism : "to depict reality in its revolutionary development" / Brandon Taylor

Realism, modernism, and photography : "at last, at last the mask has been torn away" / John Roberts

Cinematic realism : "a recreation of the world in its own image" / Laura Marcus

The current of critical irrealism : "a moonlit enchanted night" / Michael Lowy

Psychoanalysis and the Lacanian real : "strange shapes of the unwarped primal world" / Slavoj Zizek

Feminist theory and the return of the real : "what we really want most out of realism ..." / Helen Small

Realism and anti-realism in contemporary philosophy : "what's truth got to do with it" / Christopher Norris

Afterword : a note on literary realism / Fredric Jameson