This chapter explores the complex role of, and debates over, realism in Caribbean literature, examining its dialectical connection to modernism, as well as the relationship between the specificity of Caribbean peripheral realisms and the history of realism as such. The chapter locates its analysis in a pan-Caribbean context but deals primarily with fiction from the Anglophone territories. It begins with a discussion of several prominent critiques of literary realism advanced by Caribbean writers and theorists since the mid twentieth century. It then turns to how an understanding of realism and modernism as dialectical counterparts, rather than as successive stages in a linear literary history, allows for a sharper grasp of the shifting formal logics of “yard fiction” from the 1930s to the 1950s. Finally, drawing on the concept of peripheral realisms and their relationship to the representability of the world-system, the chapter considers the forms of cognitive mapping to be found in several recent realist Caribbean narratives, offering Diana McCaulay’s short story “Bridge over the Yallahs River” (2022) as an illustrative example.