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This chapter explains how realist fiction of the nineteenth century has been treated by critics, and experienced by readers, as an oasis from the zany ruptures of fiction that is not yet or nor longer realistic precisely because of its referentiality. If the madcap metaleptic adventures between history and fiction remain unnoticed, it would create a vertiginous hetero-ontologicality. Every sentence in which a fictional character traverses an actual city or an actual poet, has dinner with a fictional character, or an actual war is observed or fought in by a fictional character is a rupture of enormous existential proportions. That such ruptures do not feel like ruptures may be the most significant thing about them. The chapter also talks about the possibilities of hetero-ontologicality, in which various kinds of being and beings mingle and mix, allowing readers to imagine future worlds and ways of living with themselves and all of the others they have evicted from having and inhabiting “their own world.”

Whereas Romantic poetry is global in its interests, the opposite position is occupied in nineteenth-century fiction by the high-canonical realist novel, especially in France and England, masters of the two largest overseas colonial empires. Although scholarship has established a link between this literature and imperialism, the logic of realism pushes toward the everyday and proximate (or at least European), and against the representation of the distant, the exotic, the marvelous. An account of the world beyond Europe is found elsewhere, in non-realist prose fiction—in the Romantic tale, historical novel, popular adventure yarn, supernatural or otherwise anti-realist story, early modernist work, fiction (Melville) of the land-based empires on Europe’s periphery (Russia and the United States), and narratives that emerge after 1850 in Latin America, Asia, and the Near East, in European languages or not. This is the moment when Europe’s global literary influence begins, on an unprecedented scale.

In Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, realism was the traditional mode for fiction throughout the first half of the twentieth century, harnessed to the call of establishing distinctive national identities. Realism evolved very differently in these three nations, but it remained the dominant mode in the post-war decade, albeit always and increasingly in contention with and affected by modernist and, later, postmodernist influences. In the South Pacific, literary writing often began with the transcription of myths and stories from local languages, but otherwise most fiction has relied on realism, especially in the decolonizing effort to assert an accurate picture of local life as a counter to white colonial narratives. The chapter examines how the realist novel has evolved in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Pacific.

This chapter examines secular strategies for rediscovering the supernatural. New understandings of fiction permitted Enlightenment-era Europeans to find an acceptable outlet for their fascination with otherworldly phenomena in the protected space of literature. In the mid-eighteenth century, “fantastic” and “realist” fiction were both understood as inhabiting an imaginative realm that was taken for “real” while readers inhabited it. The imagination itself was seen as helping to constitute reality, a move that anticipated twentieth-century phenomenology and pragmatism. This chapter concludes that it was the Enlightenment that originally gave birth to the possibility for experiencing fiction as the site of a disenchanted enchantment, one which is “real” only as long as the story lasts.

This chapter situates the emergence of realist, nationally focused fiction alongside vernacular English and cant dictionaries in order to illuminate the complex ways they position readers in relation to vernacular languages. These genres of the vernacular present back to readers the familiar in print forms, yet do so in terms that render it unfamiliar—at once a reader's own and yet also strange. Or, they present the actually unfamiliar as, nonetheless, part of the reader's national world—what should be, but is not, familiar. English dictionaries and realist fiction of the eighteenth century create readerly expectations of discovering in a new print form what is already one's own, but also prompt a realization of the strangeness of what one might have thought was one's own.

This chapter examines how Harkness and her contemporary W. T. Stead navigated the position of journalists with an activist agenda in a transatlantic market for socially engaged publications. It explores the extent to which both Harkness and Stead made use of the ‘rhetoric of progressive Protestantism’ across the generic categories of their writing: realist fiction, activist journalism, and critical travel writing. In examining the ‘clash between socialist and evangelical rhetoric’ in the context of emerging ‘modern marketing methods’, the chapter exposes the problems inherent in labels of ideological inconsistency as applied on gendered terms.

This chapter discusses philosophical and oriental tales. The philosophical and oriental tale offer alternative means of exploring the same preoccupations as those that drive the more familiar realist and domestic fiction of the second half of the eighteenth century: a fiction that self-consciously explores relations between reader and text, between disciple and mentor, between past and present generations. Where philosophical and oriental tales differ from the domestic realist fictions is in exploring these relations on the level of form and plot rather than the level of character. It is not that character is insignificant in these tales but that it tends to demonstrate the universality of the human mind and its responses to external stimulus rather than to promote the belief in the plausibility or authenticity of persons through individualizing marks or impressions.

The literature of empire in the Renaissance, treated in this chapter and the next, extends from national consolidation to oceanic conquest and colonization. It is marked thematically by discomfort with the imperial project and formally by a logic of nonrepresentation. The farther from home the conflict, the more pronounced the pressure against mimetic accounts. Thus, civil wars and intra-European antagonisms routinely receive representation, except when the work ends up rejecting the importance of the undertaking (Shakespeare’s Hamlet). But renderings of the struggle between Christians and Muslims for control of the Mediterranean move the issue from representation to psychology (Shakespeare’s Othello) or narration (Cervantes’s Don Quijote), as if the distance between the two cultures were too great to overcome. In the case of realist fiction, moreover, this challenge is compounded by a formal imperative to stay close to home.