The Romance of Real Life, a common title in nineteenth-century European and American fiction, identifies the basic dilemma confronting realists throughout the century: reality is not always interesting, and romance is not always believable.

This simple thesis, familiar in individual cases, has never been explored as comprehensively as here. Equally attentive to philology, stylistics, plot layout, and the slow trends that transform genres, Marshall Brown’s study offers a unique slant on fictional form as a challenge rather than a rigid container, traced through a rare combination of minute close readings and large-scale synopses.

Following examinations of recent theories of form and of periodization, the book turns to the Romantic theory of the novel in the very disparate discourses in Germany, Britain, and France, then to early and marginal examples of realism, poems in novels, chapter groupings, and parallels between American and European fiction; it concludes with the disruption of realism by the new short story genre and with the ghosts in late-century novels that pave the way toward modernism.