Introduction : reclaiming realism / Matthew Beaumont -- 1. Literary realism reconsidered : "the world in its length and breadth" / George Levine -- 2. Realist synthesis in the nineteenth-century novel : "that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness" / Simon Dentith -- 3. Space, mobility, and the novel : "the spirit of place is a great reality" / Josephine McDonagh -- 4. Naturalism : "dirt and horror pure and simple" / Sally Ledger -- 5. Realism before and after photography : "the fantastical form of a relation among things" / Nancy Armstrong -- 6. The realist aesthetic in painting : "serious and committed, ironic and brutal, sincere and full of poetry" / Andrew Hemingway -- 7. Interrupted dialogues of realism and modernism : "the fact of new forms of life, already born and active" / Esther Leslie -- 8. Socialist realism : "to depict reality in its revolutionary development" / Brandon Taylor -- 9. Realism, modernism, and photography : "at last, at last the mask has been torn away" / John Roberts -- 10. Cinematic realism : "a recreation of the world in its own image" / Laura Marcus -- 11. The current of critical irrealism : "a moonlit enchanted night" / Michael Lowy -- 12. Psychoanalysis and the Lacanian real : "strange shapes of the unwarped primal world" / Slavoj Zizek -- 13. Feminist theory and the return of the real : "what we really want most out of realism ..." / Helen Small -- 14. Realism and anti-realism in contemporary philosophy : "what's truth got to do with it?" / Christopher Norris -- 15. A note on literary realism in conclusion / Fredric Jameson.