What is realism?

This chapter outlines – selectively and strategically – major frameworks in which problems of reflection, truthfulness, verisimilitude, and realism have been discussed from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Some of these frameworks (especially since the 1930s) have been purposefully developed as theories of realism, others have been cultivated, predominantly by writers, journalists, and critics, in a much richer and more porous discursive environment, in which the impulses of theory cannot be disentangled from the maelstrom of actual literary practices. Part One focuses on Georg Lukács, for it is in his work, and the attendant debates and disagreements, that an entire constellation of questions around realism is first compellingly formulated. In Part Two we continue this discussion but shift the focus to earlier discourses on realism, from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, and, crucially, such that would testify to the ‘impurity’ of theory, to its birth and subsequent existence in the fold of imbricated, at times even competing, live literary practices. Finally, Part Three reflects on the relationship between realism and older and contemporaneous alternatives.