Margaret Cohen teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. Christopher Prendergast is reader in modern French literature at Cambridge University and fellow at King’s College.

• Introduction - realism, God's secret and the body, Christopher Prendergast; female sexuality and the referent of enlightenment realisms, April Alliston; censoring the realist gaze, Jann Matlock; realism without a human face, Judith L. Goldstein; in lieu of a chapter on some French women realist novelists, Margaret Cohen; S/Z, realism and compulsory heterosexuality, Diana Knight; real fashion - clothes unmake the working woman, Anne Higonnet; Figura Serpentinata - visual seduction and the colonial gaze, Emily Apter; Flaubert and realism - paternity, authority and sexual difference, Roger Huss; the adulteress's child, Naomi Segal; the body and the body politic in the novels of the Goncourts, Patrick O'Donovan; experimenting on women - Zola's theory and practice of the experimental novel, Dorothy Kelly; temples of delight - consuming consumption in Emile Zola's "Au bonbeur des dames", Barbara Vinken; the morgue and the Musee Grevin - understanding the public taste for reality in fin-de-siecle Paris, Vanessa R. Schwartz; Bayaderes, Stereorama, and Vahat-Loukoum - technological realism in the age of empire, Rhonda Garelick; a question of reference - male sexuality in phallic theory, Charles Bernheime; Courbet's "L'origine du Monde" - the origin without an original, Linda Nochlin.

Margaret Cohen teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. Christopher Prendergast is reader in modern French literature at Cambridge University and fellow at King’s College.

• Introduction - realism, God's secret and the body, Christopher Prendergast; female sexuality and the referent of enlightenment realisms, April Alliston; censoring the realist gaze, Jann Matlock; realism without a human face, Judith L. Goldstein; in lieu of a chapter on some French women realist novelists, Margaret Cohen; S/Z, realism and compulsory heterosexuality, Diana Knight; real fashion - clothes unmake the working woman, Anne Higonnet; Figura Serpentinata - visual seduction and the colonial gaze, Emily Apter; Flaubert and realism - paternity, authority and sexual difference, Roger Huss; the adulteress's child, Naomi Segal; the body and the body politic in the novels of the Goncourts, Patrick O'Donovan; experimenting on women - Zola's theory and practice of the experimental novel, Dorothy Kelly; temples of delight - consuming consumption in Emile Zola's "Au bonbeur des dames", Barbara Vinken; the morgue and the Musee Grevin - understanding the public taste for reality in fin-de-siecle Paris, Vanessa R. Schwartz; Bayaderes, Stereorama, and Vahat-Loukoum - technological realism in the age of empire, Rhonda Garelick; a question of reference - male sexuality in phallic theory, Charles Bernheime; Courbet's "L'origine du Monde" - the origin without an original, Linda Nochlin.