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Literature of the 19th century refers toworld literature produced during the 19th century. The range of years is, for the purpose of this article,literature written from (roughly) 1799 to 1900. Many of the developments in literature in this period parallel changes in the visual arts and other aspects of 19th-century culture.
Literary realism is the trend, beginning with midnineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors, toward depictions of contemporary life and society as it was, or is. In the spirit of general "realism", realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.
Lionel Stevenson wrote that "The most explosive impact in English literature during the nineteenth century is unquestionablyThomas Carlyle's. From about 1840 onward, no author of prose or poetry was immune from his influence."
George Eliot's novelMiddlemarch stands as a great milestone in the realist tradition. It is a primary example of nineteenth-century realism's role in the naturalization of the burgeoning capitalist marketplace.
William Dean Howells was the first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States. His stories of 1850s Boston upper-crust life are highly regarded among scholars of American fiction. His most popular novel,The Rise of Silas Lapham, depicts a man who falls from materialistic fortune by his own mistakes.Stephen Crane has also been recognized as illustrating important aspects of realism to American fiction in the storiesMaggie: A Girl of the Streets andThe Open Boat.[1][2]
Adventure novels about thegold rush in Chile in the 1850s, such asMartin Rivas byAlberto Blest Gana, and thegaucho epic poemMartin Fierro by Argentine José Hernández are among the iconic and populist 19th century literary works written in Spanish, published in Latin America.
Honoré de Balzac is often credited with pioneering a systematic realism in French literature, through the inclusion of specific detail and recurring characters.[3][4][5]Fyodor Dostoyevsky,Leo Tolstoy,Gustave Flaubert, andIvan Turgenev are regarded by critics such asFR Leavis as representing the zenith of the realist style with their unadorned prose and attention to the details of everyday life. In German literature, 19th-century realism developed under the name of "Poetic Realism" or "Bourgeois Realism", and major figures includeTheodor Fontane,Gustav Freytag,Gottfried Keller,Wilhelm Raabe,Adalbert Stifter, andTheodor Storm.[6] Later "realist" writers includedBenito Pérez Galdós,Nikolai Leskov,Guy de Maupassant,Anton Chekhov,José Maria de Eça de Queiroz,Machado de Assis,Bolesław Prus and, in a sense,Émile Zola, whosenaturalism is often regarded as an offshoot of realism.
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