[1] Psychological realism is achieved with deep explorations and explanations of the mental states of the character's inner person, usually through narrative modes such as stream of consciousness and flashbacks.
[4] French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, evaluated the 12th-century Arthurian author Chrétien de Troyes' Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart and Perceval, the Story of the Grail as early examples of the style of the psychological novel.
[5] Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Madame de La Fayette's The Princess of Cleves are considered the first precursors of the psychological novel.
In the literature of the United States, Henry James, Patrick McGrath, Arthur Miller, and Edith Wharton are considered "major contributor[s] to the practice of psychological realism.
[11][12] [The Tale of Genji, as translated by Arthur Waley,] is written with an almost miraculous naturalness, and what interests us is not the exoticism — the horrible word — but rather the human passions of the novel.