This chapter begins by sketching the standard belief-desire model of action and action-explanation employed by most philosophers, while also noting some variations. Of necessity, given the immense literature on the topic, this is presented at a high level of generality, abstracting over many local disagreements. The model and its variations provide the main set of foils for the scientifically grounded accounts to be discussed in later chapters, which are then briefly previewed. The remaining sections of the chapter go on to explain and quickly motivate three major assumptions that are taken for granted throughout the remainder of the book (and also by many philosophers and almost all cognitive scientists, it should be said): realism, physicalism, and representationalism.

Chapter II reconstructs the complex frame narrative underlying The Lord of the Rings, according to which Tolkien came into possession of an old book, which allegedly included stories from an ancient past of the world and was written by three authors of Hobbit race; the book was soon supplemented by a large bulk of miscellaneous material, and was later heavily edited, through a process whose last stage was Tolkien’s own compilation and translation. The second part investigates the theoretical implications of this meta-textual frame. Some of these are related to Tolkien’s mythopoetic ambition and urgency for narrative ‘realism’; others reflect important aspects of the literary fabric of the novel, including its Hobbito-centrism, as regards both focalisation and themes. More deeply, the meta-textual frame allows Tolkien to express and self-reflect on his own experience as a writer, who perceived his stories as something ‘other’ from him, ‘given’ or ‘discovered’, and free from the control of his rational mind.

Genealogically rooted in the Gothic, melodrama, and prose romance of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sensationalism proliferated and even intensified throughout the 1870s as authors sought new forms of emotional and visceral connection with their increasingly desensitized readers. This essay recovers this somewhat more knowing second decade as the ‘post-sensational seventies,’ wherein the ‘post’ is understood in the same way that it might be if conjoined within other more familiar compounds, such as ‘post-colonial’ or ‘post-feminist,’ not as beyond a phenomenon that is past but rather as grappling self-consciously with the legacies, internal contradictions, possibilities, and pervasiveness of a set of practices that are still very much present. Ultimately, recognizing the 1870s as post-sensational means acknowledging that novelistic representations shifted decisively to accommodate the coincidental, the criminal, the nonrational, and the scandalous, as well as structurally resistant forms of gender and class, as constituent fractions of the real.

This chapter situates George Eliot’s ground-breaking realist novel, Middlemarch, in the context of a longer tradition of provincial fiction. By the time Eliot published Middlemarch, fiction that put small-town life at its centre had developed from the early nineteenth-century ‘sketch’ or ‘tale’ to the chronicle novels of Trollope and Oliphant in the 1850s and 1860s. This chapter argues that Middlemarch is a deliberate provocation regarding the cultural and aesthetic value attributed to the common, the middling, and the local in the 1870s as London exerted ever-clearer centralizing force on culture and education. Middlemarch expands the small forms of provincial fiction through expansive patterning and repetition of everyday plots and locales. This establishes a type of ethical realism in which the fact of frequency does not mean the common is dismissed, but rather is revalued in the narrative as commonality: a ground for collective identity.

“Socialist Realism, Socialist Expressionism” examines how Expressionist aesthetics metamorphosed from a radical critique of bourgeois liberalism into full-blown fascism. During his period of involvement with National Socialism, Gottfried Benn treated the Volk as an aesthetic object – as a work of art that could be shaped and refined through direct eugenic interventions. Yet Benn’s staunchest critics on the left did not dismiss his aesthetic definition of the Volk outright. Instead, they appropriated the Volk for a leftist politics. Examining the celebrated Expressionism Debate of 1937–1938, I argue that Marxists like Georg Lukács refrained from a vocabulary of class struggle in order to promote a populist aesthetics that associated the Volk with a distinctly anti-modernist literary mode: the realist novel. Hence the chapter grapples with populist cultural politics from both the radical left and right at the moment when the liberal tradition descending from Kant was reaching its nadir.

This chapter claims that two events marking the beginning and end of the decade—the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—signal a continued interest in natural historic practices of classification, observation, and visualisation. Rajan argues more specifically that texts like On the Origin of Species and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette combine eighteenth-century practices of observation and description with contemporary modes of visualisation that were popularized through optical technologies like the stereoscope. While it has become customary to view Victorian visual technologies as breaking from the epistemological assumptions of early modern philosophy and science, Rajan demonstrates that accurate and vivid description in natural history and realist fiction in fact demanded a synthesis of competing epistemologies. The work of Darwin and Brontë thus allows us to trace a methodological overlap between nineteenth-century literature and science and reassess received intellectual histories of visual culture.

Gail Marshall reflects on the European roots of George Eliot’s formulation of realism, the way in which her European experiences in the 1850s coincided with those of a very young Henry James, and how both writers embrace the challenging difference of their experiences of Europe as a prelude to developing their respective practices of realism. ‘George Eliot, Henry James, Realism, and Europe’ examines the novelists’ travels in Europe in the 1850s, the availability of European culture in Britain, Thomas Cook’s first tours to Europe, a nostalgic interest in peasants, and the publication in 1859 of David Masson’s British Novelists and their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction. The chapter argues that the experience of European travel is intrinsic to both Eliot and James’s aesthetic, as well as to the ethical practice of realism.

Global Leaders in the 21st Century examines the current context of international management and looks at the noteworthy changes in the business and leadership contexts of globalization. A major shift appears to be taking place in the global political economy. The predominant system characterized by global economic agreements, free trade, global supply chains, and multilateral institutions is being challenged by an increase in the primacy of national interests and security. In this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, traditional ways of managing are not entirely adequate, and global leaders need to develop new skills. This chapter introduces the concept of Mindful Global Leadership and its components of context sensitivity, perspective taking, and a process orientation. It also presents a global leadership typology-based task complexity and relationship complexity.

Andrew Mangham analyses the importance of narrative for the German embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, and its influence on George Eliot’s early fiction. This chapter evidences the way in which knowledge from Europe was acquired, debated, and adopted in London soirées. Van Baer’s work was welcomed by the circle of radicals, including Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Marian Evans, who congregated around John Chapman’s Westminster Review. Newly available in a partial translation by Huxley and the botanist Arthur Henfrey, von Baer’s Uber Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere (1828) specifies a theory of growth based on early differentiation of individuals, which seemed to chime with the period’s investment in industry, but also insisted on the importance of narrative. The early work of George Eliot, specifically Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede (1859), bears the imprint of von Baer’s models of individuation in the secularism that we find in her work.

This chapter situates Ian McEwan in the history of the novel of ideas, arguing that he reclaims this contested aesthetic space, producing rich and satisfying works. In doing so he pushes the boundaries of literary realism, producing a new kind of hybrid: ideational realism. The essay focuses on four novels – The Child in Time (1987), Enduring Love (1997), Saturday (2005) and Machines Like Me (2019) – a quartet of novels that illustrates the development of ideational realism throughout McEwan’s career. In these novels influential contemporary thinking is pressure-tested in the creative realm: we are invited to question the implications of science as we witness the parameters of the social novel being stretched, adjusted, and re-established. Thus, these novels represent a limited form of experimentalism, in which the significance of scientific ideas is tested, as the social relevance of realist fiction is consolidated.

This chapter argues that the brevity and inherent orality of the Russian short story allows for the introduction of new, often stigmatised subject matter and for experimentation with form and language. The short story laid the groundwork for the novel, but not by providing shorter pieces to be assembled into a more complex plot. Rather, its role was to work out innovative aesthetic and thematic models that the novel would later carry into the cultural mainstream. For this reason, the short story often came to the fore during periods of literary and ideological change. The chapter presents the evolution of the Russian short story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to Anton Chekhov, the author who finalised the shift to what we now recognise as the typical concerns of the modern short story.

The bureaucratic hierarchy established by Peter I’s Table of Ranks in 1722 irrevocably shaped the Petersburg text, above all through the poor insignificant copy clerks immortalised in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Fedor Dostoevskii all produced characters who became permanent literary icons as hapless cogs in the bureaucratic machine. The critic Vissarion Belinskii touted Gogol’s ‘realism’, promoting his use of ‘social types’ – characters recognisable from real life – to effect social change. Yet Gogol’s clerks were hardly realistic, let alone typical. Clearly the most salient prototypes for literary clerks are the literary clerks preceding them; these precursors (rather than any real-life models) became the ground on which new iterations of the hero emerged. The figure of the lowly civil servant persisted through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty-first, its copying itself becoming a medium for both cultural memory and artistic innovation.

This chapter takes as its starting point Mulk Raj Anand’s literary interest in what he describes as “earthiness”, and argues that it is neither a simplistic yardstick of social realism, nor simply a derivation of Anglo-American modernism, but something in between, something different, and perhaps something more. In common with many of the other chapters in this volume, I make the case that Mulk Raj Anand was neither a modernist nor a realist, and that for a more satisfactory evaluation of Anand-the-novelist, we need to follow an entirely different literary tradition. Focusing on the dirtiness and squalor that is present in much of Anand’s writing, I argue that Anand deploys this trope to make the novel into neither a realist depiction of the world, nor a disaffected, alienated exercise in aestheticism, but as a vehicle to explore what it might mean to be modern, what it might mean to be anti-colonialist and what it might mean to be nationalist.