What is realism? When we examine the cultural conventions which have developed around the concept of realism in the Western world, we see an emerging standard which is allied ever more closely to scientific explanations of reality, widely accepted as the ‘official’ view. Such views have determined and structured, to a large extent, the modern way in which we ‘read’ reality. The many different kinds of realism are of course a way of communicating the current agreed-upon interpretation, or interpretive consensus, of a given reality in a given place and time, and as filtered by the current view of accepted science. Rosemary Jackson in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion gives us a working basis from which to begin:

Paradoxically, each generation seems to define its version of realism differently, even when literature arises from an oral tradition in which the most important element is continuity and history. The Surrealists were famous for communicating realism as a vision that went beyond the outer appearance of things, more so even than the Romantics desired to communicate the inner essence of things. Ken Booth, citing the legendary story of Picasso painting a portrait of Gertrude Stein, argues that ‘Gertrude Stein is fixed in our minds as Picasso, not nature, made her.’