Realism and representation -- Balzac invents the nineteenth century -- Dickens and nonrepresentation -- Flaubert and the scandal of realism -- Courbet's house of realism -- George Eliot's delicate vessels -- Zola's combustion chamber -- Unreal city : Paris and London in Balzac, Zola, and Gissing -- Manet, Caillebotte, and modern life -- Henry James's turn of the novel -- Modernism and realism : Joyce, Proust, Woolf -- The future of reality?.