Straw man or profligate son?

We tend to think of literary realism largely as an invention and product of the nineteenth century. However tenuous and misguided this attribution may be, literature after 1900 is nonetheless typically seen as ideologically and expressively at variance with the nineteenth-century’s formulas for and formulations of realist aesthetics and practice. This chapter illustrates just how wrong this perception is. Its underlying premise is that realism, in whatever shade or shape, has lost none of its former appeal, manifesting itself especially in the continuing immense popularity of the historical novel and the Bildungsroman – two realist genres par excellence – but also in the diverging trajectories of the social realist novel and the (rather short-lived, as we now know) socialist realist novel. Focusing for practical reasons on the most axiomatically realist of all literary genres, the novel, the story told in this chapter is not just one of realism’s ebb and flow as it meanders through the landscape of post-1900 European-language literary history, but also one of its ups and downs, its bifurcation, transposition, amalgamation, overlay and transfer. It is also a story of realism’s intersection with and osmosis into modernism and postmodernism, both of which are all too customarily – although wrongly, as the argument here illustrates – seen as diametrically opposed to realism.