I. A Method of Collecting Geographically Distributed Occupational Vocabulary

HISTORY OF THE REALIST NOVEL is paradoxical: it is the history of a literary system that spans the globe and yet consists of distinctly local performances. While intent on describing "everyday occurrences . . . accurately and profoundly set in a definite period of contemporary history" (these are Erich Auerbach's words [485] ) , the novel, more than any other literary genre, has demonstrated a remarkable formal portability, traveling virtually intact across cultures and languages and beyond historical circumstance (see Doody). Students of the novel will readily grant these "historical" facts, but there is less consensus regarding the question of how exactly the novel is able to perform these seemingly incompatible protocols. How can the novel be at once local, insular, even provincial, and yet worldly, universal, global? To what extent can the novel's representational specificity account for its verifiably global character? Traditionally and arguably this is still the dominant model today the ageold distinction between form and content has been deployed to account for the double duty performed by the novel. According to this model, the novel's loose, though fairly stable, formal traits character-centered story-telling, "thick" description, narrative focalization, standard plots, recurrent stylistic devices, the past as primary verbal tense, and so on make it particularly well suited to the task of representing, in however mediated and complex a form, widely varying local environments without significant loss of structural integrity. In a familiar projection of this account, national literatures are defined by the particular content they bring to bear on a ready-made form generically marked by the experience of the nation; the novel then becomes, by implication, a world literary form that can be transposed from one nation to another even as the transposition itself registers the existence (or marks the emergence) of a recognizably modern form of political and social organization. The seeming discontinuity obtaining