realism (literature)

realism in literature, an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity. Although realism is not limited to any one century or group of writers, it is most often associated with the literary movement in 19th-century France, specifically with the French novelists Flaubert and Balzac . George Eliot introduced realism into England, and William Dean Howells introduced it into the United States. Realism has been chiefly concerned with the commonplaces of everyday life among the middle and lower classes, where character is a product of social factors and environment is the integral element in the dramatic complications (see naturalism ). In the drama, realism is most closely associated with Ibsen 's social plays. Later writers felt that realism laid too much emphasis on external reality. Many, notably Henry James , turned to a psychological realism that closely examined the complex workings of the mind (see stream of consciousness ).

realism, a literary term so widely used as to be more or less meaningless except when used in contradistinction to some other movement, e.g. naturalism, Expressionism, Surrealism. The French realist school of the mid-19th cent. (for which the novelist Champfleury, 1821–89, produced a manifesto, Le Réalisme, 1857) stressed ‘sincerity’ as opposed to the ‘liberty’ proclaimed by the Romantics; it insisted on accurate documentation and sociological insight; subjects were to be taken from everyday life, preferably from lower-class life. This emphasis clearly reflected the interests of an increasingly positivist and scientific age. Balzac and Stendhal were seen as the great precursors of realism; Flaubert and the Goncourts as among its practitioners. French realism developed into naturalism. In England, the French realists were imitated consciously and notably by G. A. Moore and Arnold Bennett, but the English novel from the time of Defoe had had its own unlabelled strain of realism, and the term is thus applied to English literature in varying senses and contexts, sometimes qualified as ‘social’ or ‘psychological’ realism etc. (See also Socialist Realism.)

Realism, term applied to literary composition that aims at an interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. It is opposed to the concern with the unusual which forms the basis of romance, but it does not proceed, as does naturalism, to the philosophy of determinism and a completely amoral attitude. Although the novel has generally been considered the form best suited to the artistic treatment of reality, realism is not limited to any one form. As an attitude of the writer toward his materials, it is relative, and no chronological point may be indicated as the beginning of realism, but the 19th century is considered to mark its origin as a literary movement. The example of science, the influence of rational philosophy, the use of documentation in historical study, as well as the reaction against attenuated romanticism, all had their effect in creating the dominance of realism at this time. Although influenced by English and foreign authors, to a great extent the American transition from romance to realism in fiction was indigenous, but it occurred gradually. Frontier literature, frequently realistic in its observation of detail, merged in the general stream of influence through the work of such authors as Clemens, while the all‐inclusive zest for experience displayed in Whitman's descriptive poems is another primary source of modern realism. A realistic attitude toward their materials may be noted in the stories of Harriet Beecher Stowe, De Forest, and Rebecca H. Davis, but the first concerted movement was probably that excited by the interest in local color. Although such writers as Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, Cable, and F.H. Smith were frequently romantic in stressing eccentric manners, they were realistic in attending to minute details, and to some extent in their treatment of character. The tendencies of these writers were carried further by such novelists as Joseph Kirkland, Edward Eggleston, Hamlin Garland, and E.W. Howe. Although far less concerned with homely setting or themes, Howells, Henry James, and later Edith Wharton were also realistic in their depiction of certain special social environments, extending realism into the comedy of manners and into psychological perception of character. Somewhat later novelists such as H.B. Fuller, Upton Sinclair, and Ernest Poole, although often sentimental, were concerned with exposing the social evils that thwarted the happiness of their characters, and thereby used realism for humanitarian protest of a sort that later became much more determined as used by writers of proletarian literature. Although there have been substantial shifts of sensibility in 20th‐century American literature, as for example to a new concern with the novel as romance, realism has continued to be a major mode of expression.