Realism has occupied an ambivalent place in the career of the novel through the twentieth century. After its heyday in the nineteenth century, realism was abandoned by many literary movements—most famously Anglo-American modernism and Latin-American magical realism. This chapter argues that realism has made a comeback in contemporary times through a postcolonial allegorical appropriation of the novel where realism functions to critique literal and epistemic violence and project alternative worlds. Contemporary world realism arises from a nexus of ethical, epistemological and aesthetic concerns that position the novel as a space for reasoned reflection on the traumatic emergence of the contemporary world system. The chapter explores the implicit historicism of world realist aesthetics and novelists’ engagement with conflicts about historical process, world-systems, and temporality shaping debates in world literature today.