The goal of this monograph is to complicate the postmodernist argument that art is always already political and does so by studying literary realism as practiced by American and Chinese writers, utilizing the perspective of Michel Foucault. It performs a careful reading of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and The Princess Casamassima, William Dean Howell's A Hazard of New Fortunes, and The World of Chance, Liu Binyan's People or Monster? and Sound is Better Than Silence and Zhang Xianliang's Half Man is Woman and Getting Used to Dying. It demonstrates that both sets of realist writers provide interpretive presentations of social realities in order to dismantle cultural appearances (the gospel of wealth, social Darwinism, political liberalism, party purity and historical progress).