"Realist Vision" explores the claim to represent the world 'as it is'. Peter Brooks takes a new look at the realist tradition and its intense interest in the visual. Discussing major English and French novels and paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brooks provides a lively and perceptive view of the realist project.Centering each chapter on a single novel or group of paintings, Brooks examines the 'invention' of realism beginning with Balzac and Dickens, its apogee in the work of such as Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola, and its continuing force in James and modernists such as Woolf. He considers also the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud, and such recent phenomena as 'photorealism' and 'reality TV'.

Peter Brooks has published on narrative and narrative theory, on the 19th and 20th century novel, mainly French and English, and, more recently, on the interrelations of law and literature. He is the author of several books, including Realist Vision (2005), Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000), Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994), Body Work (1993), Reading for the Plot (Knopf, 1984), The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and The Novel of Worldliness (1969). He co-edited, with Paul Gewirtz, Law’s Stories (1996) and, with Alex Woloch, Whose Freud? (2000). He is a member of theEditorial Advisory Board for Comparative Literature and Yale Journal of Law & Humanities. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, London Review of Books, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Yale Law Journal, and elsewhere.

A new book, Henry James Goes to Paris, will be published by Princeton University Press in spring 2007.

Brooks has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of Texas, Austin, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Bologna, and the Georgetown University Law Center, and as Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School in 1994. During the 2001-2002 academic year, he was Eastman Professor at Oxford University, and Fellow of Balliol College. He was University Professor at the University of Virginia from 2003 to 2006, teaching in the English Department and the Law School.