ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the thrust of philosophical work on the nature of the real, and analyses how this may affect perspectives on fiction. The meaning of realism has been context specific, its commitments incorporating anything from a belief in mind-independent reality to an objection to the ideology of modernism. In present culture, the critical or ironic ‘edge’ associated with postmodernist anti-realist techniques has fallen flat, so much so, that the devices of postmodernist anti-realism are submerged within a new and yet formally quite familiar mode of realism. For Bertolt Brecht, authentic literary realism was not a fixed genre or mimetic code, but rather a dialectical practice, responsive to the particularity of a given era’s material conditions and social requirements. The well-known history of the aesthetic transformation or aesthetic derealisation is implied wherever the ideology of modernism and the discontents of postmodernism are called into question.
