The essays in this collection, which was originally published in 1986, address fundamental issues of literary realism that have long been given prominence by J. P. Stern, the distinguished writer on German literature and author of the seminal study On Realism. In the prevailing theoretical climate problems associated with literary realism assumed great urgency. Such problems are the notion of literary 'truth to life', the survival of the concept of 'realism' in the light of modern hermeneutical theory, the perspective adopted by the contemporaries of Barthes and inheritors of Nietzsche on the canonical prose writers of the nineteenth century, and the future for an exegetical tradition represented in the work of Erich Auerbach.