Introduction ; empire and remapping realism -- Part I. Balzac and the problem of empiricism. Empiricism and empire : La peau de chagrin -- Marginal realism in Le Pere Goriot -- Realism, romance, and La fille aux yeux d'or -- Part II. Trollope and the problem of integration. Economies of romance and history in 'Phineas Finn' -- Mapping and unmapping 'Phineas Finn' and 'Phineas redux' -- Global London and 'The way we live now' -- Part III. Fontane and the problem of familiarity. "Berlin wird Weltstadt" : nation, city, and world in 'Cecile' -- The imaginative geography of 'Effi Briest' -- Conclusion : the limits of "realism."

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"In Realism's Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Geoffrey Baker demonstrates that realist fiction's stance toward both progress and the foreign or supernatural is much more complex than established scholarship has assumed. The work of Honoř de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and Theodor Fontane explicitly laments the loss of mystery in the world due to increased knowledge and exploration. To counter this loss and to generate the complications required for narrative, these three authors import peripheral, usually colonial figures into the metropolitan centers they otherwise depict as disenchanted and rationalized: Paris, London, and Berlin. Baker's book examines the consequences of this duel for realist narrative and readers' understandings of its historical moment. In so doing, Baker shows Balzac, Trollope, and Fontane grappling with new realities that frustrate their inherited means of representation and oversee a significant shift in the development of the novel"--Publisher's description

"If realist novels are the literary avatars of secular science and rational progress, then why are so many canonical realist works organized around a fear of that progress? Realism is openly indebted, at the level of form and content, to imperialist and scientific advances. However, critical emphasis on this has obscured the extent to which major novelists of the period openly worried about the fate of mystery and the dissolution of tradition that accompanied science's shrinking of the world. Realism's modernization is inseparable from nostalgia."

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