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 -- 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 Löwy -- Psychoanalysis and the Lacanisn real: "strange shapes of the unwarped primal world" / Slavoj Žižek -- 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 -- A note on literary realism in conclusion / Fredric Jameson.