When it comes to literature, the word “realist” – like “modernist” and “romantic” – has been used so often, in so many different ways, that it is now almost meaningless. This overfamiliarity conceals the fact that “realist” may be the oddest adjective ever applied to works of the imagination. Indeed, the realist novel is a perfect oxymoron: Reality is what is given, while fiction, as its name suggests, is always something made. Equally strange is the idea that realism could be the name of a specific period or school, the 19th-century lineage from Balzac through Flaubert to Zola, with belated American heirs like Dreiser and Norris. How could it be that, in the 3,000 years human beings have been writing, this 50- or 100-year span was the only one to discover the secret of making literature “real”? Doesn’t such a judgment automatically convict earlier novelists of incompetence, and imply that later novelists have been willfully perverse?

The only way to make sense of these contradictions is to recognize that realism must not be confused with reality; the latter is the ultimate source of all literature, while the former is just one set of techniques for approaching it. But the stubborn fact remains that, while realism may be just a convention, it is a tremendously powerful and enduring one. It has been almost a century since Virginia Woolf, in her famous essay “Modern Fiction,” charged that the great Edwardian realists “spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring.” Yet the “transitory” techniques of realism – the omniscient narrator, the dense description of objects and settings, the hard-headed attention to social class – continue to be our touchstones when reading fiction. In their absence, most readers are inclined to feel at least momentarily bewildered.

Take, for instance, these sentences from two famous novels:

“Towards the middle of July, in the year 1838, one of those vehicles called milords, then appearing in the Paris squares for the first time, was driving along the rue de l’Universite, bearing a stout man of medium height in the uniform of a captain in the National Guard.”

“Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.”

The first is the opening sentence of “Cousin Bette,” published in 1847; the second is from the beginning of the second chapter of “Ulysses,” published in 1922. Joyce is three-quarters of a century nearer to us than Balzac; why, then, is his attempt at capturing reality still so much more estranging than Balzac’s? Why are we reassured by Balzac’s exactness about time and place and fashion – which cozily answers the expectations bred in us by movies, television journalism, and genre fiction – while Joyce’s exactness about consciousness remains challenging and even rebarbative?

These are some of the questions that any critic of realism must address, especially one who – as Morris Dickstein does in his new collection of essays, “A Mirror in the Roadway” (Princeton University Press, 280 pages, $26.95) – presents himself as a defender of realism against trendy enemies like metafiction and deconstruction. But while several of the essays, lectures, and reviews gathered in this intelligent book deal with writers from the realist tradition – from Sinclair Lewis to William Kennedy – Mr. Dickstein is much too good a reader to lay down the sort of naive defense of realism Tom Wolfe did in his screed “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.”

Indeed, in the book’s title essay, Mr. Dickstein immediately acknowledges that “we must distinguish between realism, a varied set of conventions and period styles, and reality itself, which can be approached or simulated by many different styles, some of them far from ‘realistic.'” He goes on to endorse Lionel Trilling’s observation that even a writer like Hawthorne, who called his books “romances,” was a realist, if we consider all the depth and ambiguity of the real: “shadows are also part of reality,” Trilling wrote, “and one would not want a world without shadows, it would not even be a ‘real’ world.” Mr. Dickstein, too, appreciates the way that violations of realism can be approaches to reality. “A Mirror in the Roadway” contains warm appreciations of Beckett, Garcia Marquez, and Celine, none of whom are realists by any stretch of the imagination.

In other words, if Mr. Dickstein were a less intelligent critic, his book might be more aggressively polemical. As it is, what he offers is not a manifesto for realism – despite his title, which invokes Stendhal’s famous metaphor for the writer’s complete fidelity to the outside world – but a series of thoughtful studies. The book makes one envy Mr. Dickstein’s students (he teaches at CUNY Graduate Center), who get to be introduced to these writers – Cather, Fitzgerald, Kafka, Orwell, Grass, and more – by a critic of such warm and varied sympathies. And even an experienced reader will make some new acquaintance in these pages – whether it be S.Y. Agnon’s modernist Hebrew novel “Only Yesterday,” or Gunter Grass’s war-of-the-sexes saga “The Flounder,” or even Mary McCarthy’s seldom-read “The Company She Keeps.”

Mr. Dickstein, who was a frequent contributor to Partisan Review in its latter days, is especially engaged and engaging on the subject of Jewish American writing and the New York intellectual milieu: his essays on Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Irving Howe are some of the highlights of the book. This is entirely appropriate, since few critics today are as successful as Mr. Dickstein in carrying on the work for which he praises Howe: “to connect intimately with the literary text and make sense of it to a broader public.”