Literature
Realism
Realism in literature is a movement that emerged in the 19th century, aiming to depict everyday life and society with accuracy and detail. It focuses on portraying characters and events in a way that reflects the real world, often addressing social issues and human experiences. Realist writers strive to present a truthful and objective representation of the world, often using precise and unembellished language.
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11 Key excerpts on "Realism"
eBook - ePub- G. R. Thompson(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Chapter 2 Of Realism and Reality Definitions and ContextsAs a literary term, Realism normally refers to a theory and practice of fiction in which the artistic goal is to portray “life as it is” – rather than intensified or as it should be – and in simple direct language rather than striving for striking metaphors and indulging in rhetorical flourishes. The elevated subject matter of classic tragedy, or the poetic elements of optative romanticism, or the sentimental aspects of domestic novels and romances, or the hair-raising events of gothic romances were to be downplayed or avoided in favor of the everyday, average, prosaic aspects of life.Realism in this sense was especially prominent in France, England, the United States, and Russia from about the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s and 1940s (and beyond). But there are realistic, mimetic elements in works written centuries before: in the Iliad and the Odyssey (c. eighth century bc), in the plays of Sophocles (496–406 BC), in Boccaccio's Decameron tales (1351–1353) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), in the plays of Shakespeare (1564–1616) and other Renaissance dramatists. Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) presents a hybrid form of a romance and novel in which the interplay of worldviews is centrally informed by the mixture of Realism with idealized romanticism. Many consider this seventeenth-century work the cornerstone of the modern novel.In the English-speaking world, literary historians generally point to the principal eighteenth-century British novelists as anticipating the nineteenth century in the development of modern Realism. In American literature, the primary meaning of Realism indicates a period: the historical era from about a decade after the American Civil War to a decade or two after World War I.1 But literary Realism, even when confined to a historical period, is not a single undiversified idea or theoretical program or movement. In both Britain and America, major fictional forms partaking of both Realism and romance included the domestic novel , the novel of manners , and the sentimental novel . In America there was an important, predominantly realist, movement toward regionalism , within which broad rubric a form called local color is sometimes distinguished. Both centrally involve a forceful vernacular style (idiomatic spoken language), often in dialect (regional or ethnic idiom). In addition, we can identify, at the minimum, several forms of realist theory and practice in Europe and America: objective Realism , compassionate Realism , benevolent Realism , and sentimental Realism . There is also a distinction to be made between intense “social reformist” Realism and “quiet” Realism. Variations on Realism and anti-romance are also in tension with, or in complementary relation to, impressionism and expressionism and most especially naturalism .2
eBook - ePub- Raymond Williams(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Parthian Books(Publisher)
7 Realism and the Contemporary NovelThe centenary of ‘Realism’ as an English critical term occurred but was not celebrated in 1956. Its history, in this hundred years, has been so vast, so complicated and so bitter that any celebration would in fact have turned into a brawl. Yet Realism is not an object, to be identified, pinned down and appropriated. It is, rather, a way of describing certain methods and attitudes, and the descriptions, quite naturally, have varied, in the ordinary exchange and development of experience. Recently, I have been reconsidering these descriptions, as a possible way of defining and generalising certain personal observations on the methods and substance of contemporary fiction. I now propose to set down: first, the existing variations in ‘Realism’ as a descriptive term; second, my own view of the ways in which the modern novel has developed; third, a possible new meaning of Realism.There has, from the beginning, been a simple technical use of ‘Realism’, to describe the precision and vividness of a rendering in art of some observed detail. In fact, as we shall see, this apparently simple use involves all the later complexities, but it seemed, initially, sufficiently accurate to distinguish one technique from others: Realism as opposed to idealisation or caricature. But, also from the beginning, this technical sense was flanked by a reference to content: certain kinds of subject were seen as Realism, again by contrast with different kinds. The most ordinary definition was in terms of an ordinary, contemporary, everyday reality, as opposed to traditionally heroic, romantic or legendary subjects. In the period since the Renaissance, the advocacy and support of this ‘ordinary, everyday, contemporary reality’ have been normally associated with the rising middle class, the bourgeoisie. Such material was called ‘domestic’ and ‘bourgeois’ before it was called ‘realistic’, and the connexions are clear. In literature the domestic drama and, above all, the novel, both developing in early eighteenth-century England with the rise of an independent middle class, have been the main vehicles of this new consciousness. Yet, when the ‘realist’ description arrived, a further development was taking place, both in content and in attitudes to it. A common adjective used with ‘Realism’ was ‘startling’, and, within the mainstream of ‘ordinary, contemporary, everyday reality’ a particular current of attention to the unpleasant, the exposed, the sordid could be distinguished. Realism thus appeared as in part a revolt against the ordinary bourgeois view of the world; the realists were making a further selection of ordinary material which the majority of bourgeois artists preferred to ignore. Thus ‘Realism’, as a watchword, passed over to the progressive and revolutionary movements.
eBook - ePub- Jacob Stratman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
Chapter 4 Realism and Naturalism (1865–1910) RealismI 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.NaturalismLiterary 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. There is a glass ceiling and you will hit it every time you venture beyond your status. Depressing, huh? Yes, it is. There is more to the literary movement than that, of course. Naturalism was greatly influenced by the work of Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Karl Marx, and Emile Zola, and other naturalists who posited that humans are not that different from animals in that they merely respond to natural and environmental forces without fully understanding the forces or their reactions to them. What is also important about naturalist fiction is that the author and the narrator are amoral in their depictions of the characters and the plot: they do not judge or editorialize; they merely observe.
I Realism VERSUS EXPERIMENTALISM? 1 Realism AND MODERNISM THE PRACTICE OF LITERARY Realism Realism, I have suggested, is a notoriously tricky term to define. Even when limited to the realm of literary writing it has an aesthetic and a cognitive dimension neither of which can be wholly separated one from the other. Aesthetically, Realism refers to certain modes and conventions of verbal and visual representation that can occur at any historical time. Yet Realism is associated particularly with the secular and rational forms of knowledge that constitute the tradition of the Enlightenment, stemming from the growth of scientific understanding in the eighteenth century. Underpinning Enlightenment thought is an optimistic belief that human beings can adequately reproduce, by means of verbal and visual representations, both the objective world that is exterior to them and their own subjective responses to that exteriority. Such representations, verbal and visual, are assumed to be mutually recognisable by fellow human beings and form the basis of knowledge about the physical and social worlds. The values of accuracy, adequacy and truth are fundamental to this empirical view of knowledge and its representational form: Realism. It follows from this that literary modes of writing that can be recognised as realist are those that, broadly speaking, present themselves as corresponding to the world as it is, using language predominantly as a means of communication rather than verbal display, and offering rational, secular explanations for all the happenings of the world so represented. 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
eBook - ePub- Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall, John Peck(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
41 Realism and the English Novel Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth DOI: 10.4324/9780203403624-46Critical discussions of the English novel and of its Realism once tended to treat these two separate subjects as one, as if presuming that verisimilitude was somehow the condition to which all novels aspired, and that the emergence of the English novel was tantamount to the emergence of a fully-fledged narrative Realism. Realism was simply taken for granted as the aesthetic norm for the novel. Such discussions implicitly identified the scope of ‘Realism’ with the scope of ‘the novel’; the term ‘Realism’ functioned primarily as a term of praise rather than as a tool of analysis. In such a context, moreover, the term ‘Realism’ has tended to mean widely different things, depending on what qualities a particular interpreter associated with it. For example, some of the qualities more or less casually assumed to be evidences of Realism include, to name a few, particularity, circumstantiality, humble subject-matter, viewpoint, chronology, interiority, externality. While each of these qualities does have some importance in Realism, none of itself explains the realist convention.Recently, things have changed. Under the influence of novelists like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, John Hawkes and Vladimir Nabokov, Claude Simon and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and under the influence of theoretical writing based on the work of Saussure, Heidegger, Foucault and others, discussion of English Realism has adopted a more self-conscious historical and theoretical vantage point. From this perspective earlier discussions seem to take for granted the very things that most require investigation, which is to say questions concerning exactly what primary values and assumptions the realist convention entails.
eBook - ePub- Steven Earnshaw(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
Just because we live our lives in the manner which suggests that the majority subscribe to everyday Realism, it does not mean that art and literature are obliged to represent the world in this way. The opposite argument indeed might have more force, for if everyday Realism is our unthinking, habitual mode of existence, art forms which challenge this can alert us to our somewhat uncritical state, showing alternative points of view, different kinds of perception, different kinds of knowledge, alternative views of linguistic usage and narrative construction, different cognitive approaches to the world and human behaviour. I do not think that any of this can be gainsaid: modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, and the philosophical and critical ideas that lie behind these artistic modes, have shown this. The gap between the Realists and ourselves – and the realists of the 1930s and 1950s – is that there was a social necessity to work from within the Realist aesthetic. Although arguments over accessible art continue to rage, and Realism is seen as the primary aesthetic for popular art, ‘Realism’ has few of the constraints of nineteenth-century Realism and tends to once more be conflated with mimesis and being adjudged ‘realistic’. As long as things look like the things we know and behave in a plausible manner, in a spatio-temporal universe we believe to continue to exist, the art is acceptable. Such a realist aesthetic maintains some of the tenets of its nineteenth-century forbear, but lacks the self-conscious urgency and exploration of a new aesthetic and, indeed, does not feel the need to defend itself as an aesthetic.Realist writers want to give us the real, and the more interesting ones understand that they cannot rely on hackneyed methods of representation. They are no doubt perfectly aware that language is not transparent, that it is a mediation, but that still does not accord with many people’s psychological, cognitive and emotional experience of reality. Language and representation are the real, and it remains contentious to argue that modern Realism deliberately, and rather sinisterly, conflates representation with Realism. A novel such as Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (published in 2005) is a contemporary novel in the realist tradition. It deals directly with many of the social problems of the contemporary world: the effects of global capitalism, the place of religion in the modern world, questions about class, gender, race, age, family relations, and the nature of representation. It knows its literary and critical theory, yet still presents all this within the realist mode of a belief in its ability to re-present a recognisable world in an accessible language. That is a lot of ground to cover. Nevertheless, unlike Joshua Ferris’s novel, it is not aesthetically experimental, despite its knowingness, and is undoubtedly more typical of contemporary realist literature than Ferris.Has the nature of reality changed?
One of the reasons readers found Darwin’s argument for evolution in The Origin of Species
eBook - ePubReading Between the Lines
A Christian Guide to Literature
- Gene Edward Veith Jr.(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Crossway(Publisher)
It is not possible for an author to simply transcribe the objective world in a purely passive way. 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). Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a story of the brutal conditions faced by immigrants in the meatpacking plants of Chicago, led to legislation regulating the food industry (although Sinclair’s purpose was to pro mote socialist political reform).
eBook - ePubRealism and Power (Routledge Revivals)
Postmodern British Fiction
- Alison Lee(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
One of these is the doctrine of impersonality which developed as part of a larger concern for objectivity. As we will see, a Realist text in the sense that it was, and is, defined by Realist critics, does not exist. Novelists such as Walter Scott, Thackeray, Trollope, Charlotte Brontë, to name but a few, have all been hailed as writers of Realist texts. Each of their texts, however, like Adam Bede, contains self-conscious moments which in themselves undermine Realist dictates. It is interesting that even the passage from Scarlet and Black quoted (pp. 365–6), often considered an exemplum of Realist thought, occurs in a chapter which not only discusses Mathilde as an imaginative construct, but in which the narrator laments that he might well be accused of impropriety in the creation of her passions. The Realists believed that perception could be pure, and that the facts in a novel should speak for themselves without authorial commentary and its attendant reader manipulation (see Becker 1963: 28). In a chapter on “Realist Drama” in Old Saws and Modern Instances, W. L. Courtney is even insistent on removing artistic language from a purportedly Realist work: “Realism means above all else a devotion to the bare and explicit truth of human life and human character, and the avoidance of all romantic or poetic devices for obscuring the main issues” (1918: 189). Clearly the self-consciousness of authorial intervention like George Eliot’s subverts this assumption, particularly because Eliot fictionalizes her own identity by appearing in the novel at all
eBook - ePub- Mary K. Holland(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
However ultimately unsatisfying, Morris’s concerted efforts to define “Realism” across the radically changing notions about language and reality of the twentieth century, and her characterization of that fiction in terms of meticulously examined “reality effects,” helpfully elucidate four problems inherent to any such act of defining:1.How do we distinguish Realism as a period from Realism as a set of techniques, or aims, or a value system (Enlightenment or otherwise), deployed in any time period? How can the term be useful without such a distinction?2.Given the profound change in scientific descriptions of reality in the twentieth century, does any definition of Realism have to consider what it means be “real”? How might it do so? 3.How might our uses of “Realism” differentiate between realist ways of reading and realist texts?4.Is metafiction, or self-reflexivity, as became a prominent feature in postmodern fiction, actually an inherent quality of all fiction, including Realism, or is it a quality or technique that can be understood as opposed to realist fiction?In its attention to technical and formal innovations that characterize contemporary Realisms, this book aims to begin to address exactly such questions raised by Morris’s and other earlier examinations of “Realism.”Jameson’s Antinomies of RealismQuite in opposition to Morris—and to other post-modernist critics who look back on Realism as always-already linguistically, epistemologically, and ontologically savvy, and engaged in the kind of ideological unmasking more often associated with poststructural texts—Fredric Jameson conceives of Realism as a mode of writing that can neither deliver nor uncover truth, and is always invested in maintaining the status quo: “the realistic novel has a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of social reality, on the resistance of bourgeois society to history and to change”; “Realism . . . is a hybrid concept, in which an epistemological claim (for knowledge or truth) masquerades as an aesthetic ideal, with fatal consequences for both of these incommensurable dimensions. If it is social truth or knowledge we want from Realism, we will soon find that what we get is ideology.”84
eBook - ePub- Mike Wayne(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Within the Marxist tradition, naturalism represents an approach to social reality that falls short of Realism proper. The most penetrating critique of naturalism in the Marxist tradition was developed by Georg Lukács in relation to literature. He traced the development of Realism to the emergence of the historical novel in the early nineteenth century. The specifically historical novel requires the ‘derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age’, 29 which means exploring the relationship between the character and their environment. According to Lukács, the earlier eighteenth-century realistic social novels had not yet developed a sense of historical time and place, which Lukács associates also with an ability to explore or reveal when and how the contemporary world developed as it has. One of the great features of Realism is its ability to show process, something which the Cuban revolutionary filmmaker, Julio Garcia Espinosa also insisted on: ‘We maintain that … cinema must above all show the process which generates the problems,’ he wrote. 30 Prior to the historical novel proper, Swift, Voltaire and Diderot set their satirical novels in fantasy or indeterminate places and the penetrating insights they bring are of their own society but which they cannot represent in historical terms. The later development of a historical sense understands ‘history as the concrete precondition of the present’. 31 For Lukács, our ability to see and think historically is itself historically determined. It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience and moreover on a European scale
eBook - ePub- Howard Fast(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Open Road Media(Publisher)
Candyman Beechum. This is the story of a Negro worker, paid off at the end of the week, and coming into a southern town for a round of pleasure with his girl and a drink or two. How well Caldwell describes the healthy vigor of this man, his joy in the act of living. He comes into town, buys a drink, and then, unprovoked, the town marshal shoots him down. As Candyman Beechum lies on the floor, dying this horrible and useless death, the ebbing life force within him distills from that final dissolution a certainty of ultimate victory, a unity with the rising strength of his people, hope where seemingly no hope is possible. This is conscious and brilliant use of Realism, for here, without preachment or dogma, in so few lines, is the essence of Negro oppression and Negro liberation. It was around this content that Caldwell, always a writer of great talent, reached the highest levels of style and form. Today, even the bourgeois critics, never very hard to please, are inclined to compare both his form and his style to pulp writing. It is not that Caldwell lost his power to write; he lost his touch with reality; and it is with the new reality of today that he must come to grips if he is to create literature of worth and stature, instead of beating upon an empty drum.One of the major differences between Realism and the superficial realistic method is that the first is the result of struggle and the second is a retreat from struggle. Even in the best of times, the truth does not hang like a ripe fruit, waiting for anyone to pick it. Truth must be fought for and always will have to be fought for, regardless of the nature of the particular society in which it may exist; it is only the form of the struggle that will change. Today, a writer must literally grapple with reality, for the sort of bourgeois Realism that was possible not too long ago is becoming more and more limited today. A new literary force is at large in the world of today, socialist Realism—and it is already apparent that the result of this will be a new literature, compounded out of a new world outlook and judged by new standards.Socialist Realism is in a state of beginning, and like all things in the process of being born, only a small sprout of the new plant is visible. Yet it is well worth examining, for contained in this seed is the mighty tree of tomorrow.
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AS EACH NEW HISTORICAL era appears, the limits of Realism are extended; not only does life itself become richer and broader, but literature deepens and extends itself in every fashion. But in every case of the past, this deepening and broadening process was contained by the various limitations of the specific society. In a very literal sense, the economic chains which bound men in the past—and which bind so many of them today—also bound their literary products.
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