Contents -- Preface: Reconfiguring Realism -- Introduction: Realism, God's Secret, and the Body -- Female Sexuality and the Referent of Enlightenment Realisms -- Censoring the Realist Gaze -- Realism without a Human Face -- In Lieu of a Chapter on Some French Women Realist Novelists -- S/Z, Realism, and Compulsory Heterosexuality -- Real Fashion: Clothes Unmake the Working Woman -- Figura Serpentinata: Visual Seduction and the Colonial Gaze -- Flaubert and Realism: Paternity, Authority, and Sexual Difference -- The Adulteress's Child -- The Body and the Body Politic in the Novels of the Goncourts -- Experimenting on Women: Zola's Theory and Practice of the Experimental Novel -- Temples of Delight: Consuming Consumption in Emile Zola's Au Bonheur des dames -- The Morgue and the Musée Grévin: Understanding the Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de Siècle Paris -- Bayadères, Stéréorama, and Vahat-Loukoum: Technological Realism in the Age of Empire -- A Question of Reference: Male Sexuality in Phallic Theory -- Courbet's L'Origine du monde: The Origin without an Original -- Select Critical Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.