Darwin’s Origin of Species [GK26][GK27](1859), despite its almost complete silence about human evolution, was the catalyst for widespread discussion and debate during the 1860s about the history and future of humanity; about slavery and the identity of the human ‘races’; and about competition and struggle in Victorian society. Three popular novels of the early 1860s – George Meredith’s Evan Harrington [GK28](1860), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations [GK29](1860–61), and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies [GK30](1862–63) – illustrate how quickly Darwin’s ideas were appropriated into fictions dealing with race and social class in the decade of the American Civil War, the Morant Bay Rebellion, and the Second Reform Bill. Although generally associated with literary realism, Darwin’s work may be better aligned with the new narrative form so popular in the 1860s: sensation fiction.

This chapter discusses psychoanalytic definitions of psychic pain (Freud, Bion, Pontalis) in relation to two European realist texts which represent the tradition pre and post Freudian psychoanalysis: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) and Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002), which latter novel intertextually invokes Tolstoy’s work of classic realism published almost a century and a half before. The chapter argues that, while modernist literary forms, and the body of criticism spawned by the latter, are most closely associated with the idea and depiction of psychic dissolution, psychological realism anticipated both the concerns and procedures of psychoanalysis and might be regarded as providing an adjunct to modern-day therapeutic practices.

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.

The literary career of Richard Eun-kook Kim may best be viewed as a set of narrative responses to his biography and the broader political dilemma of modern Korea, one beset by differential and competing historical colonialisms and ideologies on the peninsula. Key figures in the USA were marshalled to serve Cold War interests by making literature a central instrument in winning transnational hearts and minds; Kim would benefit from this by becoming the first Asian to enroll in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, from which he would draft his first novel, The Martyred, whose popularity signaled that readers viewed Kim and his work as an expression of US liberal value from an Asian beneficiary of the Cold War project. But Kim’s form of realism actually serves as a form of narrative autonomy from such expected discursive capture. This, and in his later forays into speculative fiction and elegiac life writing – the novel The Innocent (1968) and collection Lost Names: Scenes of a Korean Boyhood (1970), respectively – Kim narrates a Korean temporality that seeks to minimize, even as it acknowledges, the influence of imperial powers.