ABSTRACT
As a literary critic, realism means to me first of all literary or aesthetic realism – the pre-eminent aesthetic mode in Western culture for several centuries, and one of such astonishing tenacity that one suspects it must satisfy all kinds of obscure unconscious requirements, not to speak of ideological ones. So I shall begin with a word or two about this notably bedevilled category. Broadly speaking, literary realism can denote one of four things: historical realism, meaning the work of a particular literary-historical period, let’s say roughly speaking from Daniel Defoe to Fyodor Dostoyevsky; methodological realism, meaning a set of literary techniques and representations devoted to the purpose of verisimilitude, which is not confined to a particular period; what I might risk calling ontological realism, namely an art-form whose cognitive force is thought to uncover the way the world fundamentally is; and effective realism, meaning the way a work strikes an audience from a realist viewpoint. If arguments over literary realism are as fraught as they are, it is partly because these four categories (and there are others) can be permutated, conflated and opposed in many kinds of ways.
