The standard trajectory of realism, modernism, and postmodernism represents a misunderstanding of the novel’s history. The innovations of modernism and postmodernism have not rendered realism obsolete, as the vast majority of novelists continued to produce in the realist mode. John Updike in his criticism explicitly placed himself in the realist tradition of American fiction he traced to William Dean Howells, and Updike’s connection to realism was widely recognized. But the Rabbit novels do not merely continue the older fictional conventions of realism. Rather, they make use of modernist techniques, such as stream of consciousness narration, and they describe aspects of life absent from earlier realism. They regard mass culture as a significant element of the world they represent, and provide an alternative to the theory of mass culture proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno. In the first two of thesde, Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux, music is a significant part of this. What Updike’s novels suggest is not just a new way of telling a story, but that there was a new reality as electronic mass media took up an increasing amount of attention.

realism continues to be misunderstood under the influence of 1970s literary and film theory and its continuing import underrecognized in literary and cultural histories. My approach to realism is formalist in the sense that Brian McHale’s Postmodern Fiction is formalist: it is a “descriptive poetics.” My argument is motivated primarily by what I regard as serious persistent errors in academic discourses.These errors are in large measure the result of arguments within the Left. My goal in this book is not to restore realism to the place Georg Lukács once assigned it as the only politically correct kind of literature, but rather to show the continued vitality of realism in late-20th century American culture

The introduction makes a case for returning to the topic of Boccaccio’s realism through the lens of law and rhetoric. Boccaccio’s Decameron is not just realistic from a stylistic perspective, a mark of the authors modernity. Rather, the work is itself a critical examination of the uses and abuses of realism. This examination of everyday, social mimesis occurs most trenchantly in the Decameron’s numerous trial scenes. Accordingly, this introduction argues that we should shift focus from Boccaccio the expert canonist to Boccaccio the astute observer of procedural law. It argues, further, that that the difference between Dante’s and Boccaccio’s realism can be seen as a legal-procedural difference. Dante prefers in inquisitorial poetics aimed at uncovering hidden truths while Boccaccio’s realism is dialectical and accusatorial.