In undertaking to write about “realism” in a broad, summary way, I recognize that I can bring very little fresh news. I have made my own arguments about it in a book now more than twenty-five years old – The Realistic Imagination – and it seems merely redundant to repeat the arguments I made there, although I know no way of writing about realism without reverting to at least some of them; and since the publication of that book a large critical literature about realism has continued to grow, suggesting that realism has struggled back, though in a considerably weakened form, and under the scrutiny of very skeptical eyes, to some of the respectability that it lost, at least among highbrow writers, early in the twentieth century. What credit it had by the mid-twentieth century seemed to have been exhausted entirely by the radically anti-realist arguments of modern literary theory after the 1960s, when the very notion of representing “reality” in any credible way was taken as reprehensible (perhaps ideologically dangerous) naïveté, or simple bad faith. For the modernists, Virginia Woolf's marvelous and famous essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown,” brilliantly dramatizes the aesthetic (and psychological and even moral) inadequacy of realist attempts to register in all their particularity things as they are as opposed to finding ways into interiority and the mysteries of the self.