Defoe's fiction is traditionally labeled “realistic.” But realism is a slippery notion. Once we move beyond basic biological circumstances, “reality” manifests itself as a historically variable entity that can be defined only tentatively according to prevailing philosophical, social, economic, and technological conditions. From antiquity onwards European literature had vividly represented many of those fundamental life events and physical needs - alimentary, sexual, and excretory for example - that readers immediately recognize and mark as “realistic.” Traditionally, however, such representations were until relatively modern times relegated to the lower genres in the hierarchy of literary value that extended downwards from epic and tragedy, poetic genres that featured as their actors gods and heroes, to the lesser forms of mostly comic prose genres peopled by ordinary folk doing ordinary (and amusing) things. Defoe's narratives certainly offer accounts of the lives of ordinary people, some of them socially marginal or even criminal, but his fiction is never realistic in the simple sense of representing basic human functions like sex or excretion or physical decay, although two of his novels, Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), are about women who have many sexual partners (even if their descriptions of sexual acts are extremely reticent and even prudish). But the rendering of the particulars of experience, especially human biological facts, is not where his “realistic” originality lies. Defoe's “realism” as a novelist comes in his vivid evocation of individuals as they examine the conditions of their existence and explore what it means to be a person in particularized social and historical circumstances. Looking back on their lives, his characters discover the nature of their particular reality.