The Age of Silver advances a "horizontal" method of comparative literature and applies this approach to analyze the multiple emergences of early realism and novelistic modernity in Eastern and Western cultural spheres from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Naming this era of economic globalization the Age of Silver, Ning Ma emphasizes the bullion flow from South America and Japan to China through international commerce, and argues that the resultant transcontinental monetary and commercial co-evolutions stimulated analogous socioeconomic shifts and emergent novelistic realisms. The main texts addressed within include The Plum in the Golden Vase (China), Don Quixote (Spain), The Life of an Amorous Man (Japan), and Robinson Crusoe (England).