SOURCE: "Female Sexuality and the Referent of Enlightenment Realisms," in Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre, edited by Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast, Cultural Politics, No. 10, University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp. 11-27.

In the following essay, Alliston argues that there were several distinct types of realism at work in the early novel.

Twentieth-century historians of the novel generally distinguish the emerging genre from earlier (romance) narrative by its increased "realism," variously defined in terms of referentiality to the details of a quotidian experience shared by readers.' Judged by this standard, theorized as it is from the practice of nineteenth-century high realism, most eighteenth-century novels tend to appear underdeveloped, still uncomfortably close to the romance genre satirized in one of the first novels, Don Quixote (itself, of course, hardly "high realist"). Early novels may well be making a gesture of reference to something they identify as "the real...