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.

August Wilson’s Century Cycle, which consists of ten plays written between 1984 with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and 2005’s Radio Golf, with each of the ten plays taking place in a different decade of the twentieth century, must be understood as essentially realist. Not only is Wilson’s general motive for his project—to represent African American experience during the twentieth century—clearly realist, but each play is in dialogue and staging in keeping with the theatrical realism going back to Ibsen and Chekov, and informing the American dramatic tradition of O’Neill, Miller, Hansberry, and many others. The Century Cycle, however, takes this realism in a profoundly new direction in the representation of the African American experience over the course of the twentieth century. The Cycle has as much in common with nineteenth-century novels as it does with these theatrical predecessors. Wilson wants to represent the complexity of social life and its contradictions over the span of 100 years by giving us ten dramatic moments. Yet Wilson’s realism is complicated by his inclusion of fantastical elements within otherwise entirely plausible dramas. I show that realism prevails despite such elements as ghosts and a 300 year-old woman.

Film theorists rewrote the history of cinema by claiming that standard Hollywood products, long regarded as patently unreal, escapist entertainment, were realist. The chapter shows how and why they were wrong, and it argues that there are significant inherent limitations that the medium of the commercial fiction film places on any attempt at realism, especially the standard theatrical running time. In order to do this, I focus on the films of Howard Hawks, whose films have been said to best illustrate what Robert Ray calls Hollywood’s invisible style. Hawks was used to illustrate classic Hollywood’s supposed illusionistic realism, which it was claimed allowed movies to disseminate all manner of ideological mischief. But one only need to pay attention to the films themselves to see that they don’t claim to be realist. Indeed, Hawks’s films often seem to be hermetically sealed off from ordinary life, ignoring the details of social relations in which realist narratives are grounded. In this he entirely typical of Hollywood film then and now. Finally, I look at Italian neorealism, the films of John Sayles, and other films that are more properly understood as realist.

The Wire is an example of the way that new technologies and methods of dissemination have made realism possible on television. Where broadcast TV required episodes that could be watched independently and that were structured by the need for commercial interruptions, pay networks such as HBO and the more recent streaming services allow for long-form narratives that develop over many weeks and stretch on for years. The Wire has been widely recognized for its realism, which, however, is usually equated with what is seen as the program’s accuracy. I show how it makes use of conventions of realism inherited from nineteenth century fiction, which are enabled by its structure as a long-form program. The Wire makes use of genres not typically associated with realism, including crime fiction (the police procedural), TV’s police melodramas, and the ancient genre of tragedy as a plot form in Hayden White’s sense. The series incorporates this variety of genres in the service of a vision of ordinary life that continually surprises the viewers. The Wire thus demonstrates the power of new forms of television to represent social complexity to a degree not found in media other than print.

The critique of realism dominant in the 1970s and 1980s should be understood in the context of the longer history of anti-realism that accompanied the rise of literary modernism. Misconceptions about realism deriving from three sources within the larger frame of discourse of French theory: the modernist rejection of realism as an outmoded form; general claims about language, representation, and knowledge, making it harder to see the validity of the realist project; explicit attacks on realism, which need to be read as an argument with Lukács and the version of Marxism he represented. It is my hypothesis that the conception of realism as an epistemological problem is rooted these three tendencies, and once those positions are no longer assumed, then it can be shown that realism entails no special epistemological pleading and does not offer or require any particular philosophy of knowledge. Questions regarding realism’s truth should (and, if fact usually do) turn on what is represented, rather than on the claim that it has been represented truthfully. Realism should be understood as a set of conventions that emerge in nineteenth- century fiction and which have been recognized by critics since at least the second half of the twentieth century.

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