The persistence of realism in modernist fiction Form vs. content aesthetics vs. politics modernism vs. realism: these entrenched binaries tend to structure work in early 20th century literary studies even among scholars who seek to undo them. The Persistence of Realism demonstrates how realisms defining concerns sympathy class social determination animate the work of Henry James James Joyce Virginia Woolf Samuel Beckett and Ralph Ellison. In contrast to the oft told tale of an aesthetically rich modernism overthrowing realisms social commitments along with its formal structures Stasi shows how these writers engaged with realism in concrete ways. The domestic novel naturalist fiction novels of sentiment and industrial tales are realist structures that modernist fiction simultaneously preserves and subverts. Putting modernist writers in conversation with the realism that preceded them The Persistence of Realism demonstrates how modernisms social concerns are inseparable from its formal ones.