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.