Literary Realism
Literary Realism is a literary movement that emerged in the 19th century, aiming to depict everyday life and society with accuracy and detail. It focuses on presenting characters and events in a realistic and believable manner, often addressing social issues and the human condition. Literary Realism seeks to capture the complexities and nuances of ordinary life, offering a mirror to the world as it is.
7 Key excerpts on "Literary Realism"
eBook - ePub- Steven Earnshaw(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...1 The nineteenth-century Realist novel: two principles Characteristics of the Realist novel The Realist novel presents stories, characters and settings that are similar to those commonly found in the contemporary everyday world. This requires events to take place in the present or recent past, and the events themselves are usually organised in a linear, chronological sequence, and located in places familiar to author and audience either through direct observation or report. The characters and storylines are plausible, and in this they are therefore commonplace rather than out of the ordinary. The desire to portray contemporary everyday life entails and requires a breadth of social detail, and, as a consequence, the classes represented tend to be those categorised as working class and middle class, since these form the majority of the population. The medium of representation is prose fiction, and the prose itself is functional rather than poetic, accessible rather than elevated or ornate – it is the language of newspapers and Parliamentary reports, for instance, and aims to accurately represent the real life it draws upon. Similarly, rendering of dialogue should be authentic and plausible. The subject matter for the Realist novel is whatever is to be found in everyday life, good and bad. The narrative point of view is characteristically omniscient. The novels often engage with social issues of the day, for instance, employment relations, or the place of women in society. Related to this, the Realist novel may thus offer some moral viewpoint, but there is a Realist sensibility that pressures this to be subordinate to neutrality and objectivity as the novel strives for accuracy in its representation. As part of the drive to be accurate, the representations are often given in detail...
eBook - ePub- Jacob Stratman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...Chapter 4 Realism and Naturalism (1865–1910) REALISM I am making a slight change to the dates that the College Board (creators of the CLEP tests) states in its literature. Some scholars believe that realism as a literary movement began closer to 1870, but many more scholars point to the beginning of the Civil War as the beginning of American Literary Realism. Bullets, bloodshed, and brotherly bickering ushered in a reality that reacted strongly to the idyllic existence American romanticism painted. Then, after the battles ended, America began to grow and to expand its urban areas at the expense of its rural areas. The Industrial Revolution and increased European immigration caused a boom in urban populations. Post–Civil War America found itself in an existence of disillusionment and cynicism. Major technological breakthroughs also occurred at the end of the nineteenth century: the invention of the telephone, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and, of course, the introduction of the automobile. So Literary Realism is the label we give to those works that attempt to portray life as it actually is and not simply as the writer wishes (the latter being idealism). The brief historical information just mentioned is important because those incidents influenced writers who focused their plots and characters on the very immediate happenings of people in particular cultural moments. Realism is very interested in the mundane episodes of middle-class life; therefore, realist novels tended to lean towards social reform. Also, writers took it upon themselves to critically comment on America’s politics, economics, industry, and social issues, as well as gender, class, and race issues. Naturalism Literary naturalism is said to be a product of scientific determinism. Here’s a simple definition: You are controlled by your environment. There is no hope for you. Dreams come and dreams go. You are controlled by your gender, race, socioeconomic standing, and ethnicity...
...Two central theses drive the argument I shall develop throughout this book: firstly, questions of knowledge and relative truth are inseparable from an understanding of realism as a representational form and secondly, our ability to communicate reasonably accurately with each other about the world and ourselves is what makes human community possible. Perhaps not surprisingly, the literary genre most closely associated with realism is the novel, which developed during the eighteenth century alongside Enlightenment thought and alongside more generally that most secular mode of human existence: capitalism. For this reason, aesthetic evaluations of realism are frequently informed by or entangled with views on the development of the Enlightenment, the expansion of capitalist production and the emergence of a modern mass culture. But before moving on to questions of how Literary Realism has been evaluated, it will be useful to look at a piece of realist prose to see how far it conforms to the paradigm I have set out above. George Eliot (1819–80) is usually regarded as one of the most accomplished of English nineteenth-century realist novelists...
eBook - ePubRealism and Power (Routledge Revivals)
Postmodern British Fiction
- Alison Lee(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Nevertheless, some manifestations of the Realist movement still have currency, particularly, as Flaubert’s Parrot suggests, the notion that art is a means to truth because the artist has a privileged insight into a common sense of what constitutes “reality.” In a sense, even Geoffrey Braithwaite’s touristy enthusiasm is the result of this suspect belief. His example, however, is followed by all those similar enthusiasts who look for Michael Henchard’s house in Dorchester or Romeo and Juliet paraphernalia in Verona. Recently, the English National Trust decided to refashion the Suffolk landscape to make it resemble Constable’s painting The Hay wain, and a series of huge timbers found in the River Stour have become news items because they may be from the boat that inspired Constable’s Boat Building Near Flatford Mill. All of these are examples of a fascination with Realism. As a literary movement, 1 Realism was first formulated in mid-nineteenth-century France, although it soon gained currency in England and the rest of Europe. The term first appears in France in 1826 when a writer in Mercure Français comments that “this literary doctrine, which gains ground every day and will lead to faithful imitation not of the masterworks of art but of the originals offered by nature, could very well be called realism. According to some indications it will be the literature of the 19th century, the literature of the true” (Wellek 1966 : vol. 4:1). There is no formal manifesto of Realism in the way that the prefaces to the 1802 and 1805 editions of the Lyrical Ballads set the scope and limits of English Romanticism. However, a conjunction of publications and events in France in the mid-1850s made Realism a topic for often heated debate: It was in 1855 that the painter Courbet placed the sign “Du Réalisme” over the door of his one man show...
eBook - ePubReading Between the Lines
A Christian Guide to Literature
- Gene Edward Veith Jr.(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Crossway(Publisher)
...The author’s beliefs and assumptions keep intruding themselves, actively shaping perceptions and how they are conveyed. A writer may try to be a mirror, but cannot help also being a lamp. If a writer claims to be a realist, we must ask what that writer considers to be real. The rise of Darwinism in the nineteenth cen tury led to a literary movement known as naturalism. According to this view, only nature and nature’s laws are real. The theory of evolution taught that human beings were nothing more than animals, that human life is determined by physical laws outside of the control of the individual, and that life consists of conflict in which only the fittest will survive. This brand of realism, exemplified by Emile Zola, Stephen Crane, and Jack London, was often brilliant in its vivid descriptions, its lifelike evocations of the natural world, and its penetrating lan guage. The atmosphere of their works is generally bleak and hopeless; the characters are swept up by deterministic forces outside their con trol. Although the naturalistic writers accepted a materialistic world view, their spirits often rebelled against its implications, resulting in works of enraged despair at such an empty universe. A related view of reality was that of Karl Marx, who stressed a determinism based not so much on nature but on social forces. This helped inspire another group of writers whom we could call social real ists. At their best, these writers portrayed the dynamics of social life with penetrating insight or exposed social injustice. Sinclair Lewis sav aged small town America in novels such as Babbitt (the story of a busi nessman’s attempted rebellion against his drab middle class life) and Elmer Gantry (the story of a hypocritical evangelist who is ruined by his affair with a church secretary—notice how life sometimes imitates art)...
...4 _________________________________ REALIST REPRESENTATION In the nineteenth century, realism and the novel developed into the major narrative form that is so often the focus of attention from critics, historians and narrative theorists. The realist novel has commanded attention because it has been so supremely concerned with social setting (Snow 1978), because it allowed the development of a ‘great tradition’ which was ‘alive’ to its time (Leavis 1962), because it embodied the aspirations of the emergent and then dominant bourgeois class (Lukacs 1969), because it rationalized consciousness of time and space (Ermarth 1998) and because it provided domestic pleasures (Showalter 1978). For so many commentators, the novel is a noble attempt to place in narrative form the complexity of the social world and its contemporary flux. Raymond Williams, for example, in an analysis that was to be echoed by Anderson (1991), sees the development of the realist novel in the nineteenth century as concomitant with the rise and fall of a knowable community: the novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways. Much of the confidence of this method depends on a particular kind of social confidence and experience. In its simplest form this amounts to saying – though at its most confident it did not have to be said – that the knowable and therefore known relationships compose and are part of a wholly known social structure, and that in and through the relationships the persons themselves can be wholly known. (Williams 1970: 13) This formulation points directly to the firmly embedded belief that the novel possesses a special ability to depict the increasingly varied social world which gives rise to it. SECRETARIES TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Although purveyors of realism in the nineteenth century were beset by difficulties when describing what they were doing, they were, it seemed, reasonably confident in their ability to apprehend the real...
eBook - ePubA History of German Literature
From the Beginnings to the Present Day
- Wolfgang Beutin, Klaus Ehlert, Wolfgang Emmerich, Helmut Hoffacker, Bernd Lutz, Volker Meid, Ralf Schnell, Peter Stein, Inge Stephan, Claire Krojzl(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In general Hesekiel deliberately aspired to conservative, tendentious writing, so that there was a harmony of views between author and editor. Lifestyle and literature It was characteristic of the post-1848 period that lifestyle and literature grew increasingly apart. Clearly the ‘Realism meant by the realistic critic of literature [was] a reflection not of social totality, but of liberal ideology’ (L.Widhammer). It was in this vein that Julian Schmidt wrote in the Grenzboten (The Frontiersman) in 1855, citing Goethe, but also including his own period in the criticism: The work that is dedicated to a specific aim and expends every last shred of strength to achieving that aim manifests itself as counter to that ideal since it runs counter to the freedom and diversity of the desire for knowledge. Modern writing displays an urge to extract middle-class life from its proper sphere—an urge that threatens the overall stability of our society. The very class that is required to constitute the firm foundation of society has lost faith in itself. With a progressive liberalism in mind that would be manifestly capable of action, Theodor Vischer observed in 1842: ‘We live in an age of discontent, and the thing now is to act; only when action has been taken can we begin to write again’ (Shakespeare in seinem Verhältnis zur deutschen Poesie, insbesondere zur politischen—Shakespeare in Relation to German Poetry, Particularly Political)...
