A long critical history of the realist novel has worked to solidify a set of relations in which realism, liberal ideology, and the construction of a liberal subject all go hand in hand. Such a tight association between text and world and text and ideology tends to predetermine not only what the novel can say but who its subjects can be. What might happen were we to disentangle these generic and political ties, which circumscribe our role as readers of the realist novel, and, most significantly, shrink the worlds of these novels? Via Raymond Williams’s concept of keywords and their ability to pry open meaning rather than solidify it, this chapter argues for a far richer history of realism in alternative accounts of the realist novel that return to classical realism to read it anew or turn to so-called peripheral realisms to expand its purview and its politics beyond the confines of British imperial culture and liberal ideology. It proposes a dialectical approach to reading realism that allows the realist novel to surprise us by how it goes about knowing the world and what it can tell us about the world.