Literary realism is a movement andgenre of literature that attempts to represent mundane and ordinary subject-matter in a faithful and straightforward way, avoiding grandiose orexotic subject-matter, exaggerated portrayals, andspeculative elements such as supernatural events and alternative worlds. It encompasses both fiction (realistic fiction) and nonfiction writing. Literary realism is a subset of the broaderrealist art movement that began with mid-nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal) andRussian literature (Alexander Pushkin).[1] It attempts to represent familiar things, including everyday activities and experiences, as they truly are.
Broadly defined as "the representation of reality",[2] realism in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, withoutartificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, as well as implausible, exotic and supernatural elements. Realism has been prevalent in the arts at many periods, and is in large part a matter of technique and training, and the avoidance of stylization. In the visual arts, illusionistic realism is the accurate depiction of lifeforms, perspective, and the details of light and colour. Realist works of art may emphasize the ugly or sordid, such as works ofsocial realism,regionalism, orkitchen sink realism.[3][4] There have been various realism movements in the arts, such as theopera style ofverismo, literary realism,theatrical realism andItalian neorealist cinema. Therealism art movement in painting began in France in the 1850s, after the1848 Revolution.[5] The realist painters rejectedRomanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century.
Realism as a movement in literature was a post-1848 phenomenon, according to its first theorist Jules-Français Champfleury. It aims to reproduce "objective reality", and focuses on showing every day, quotidian activities and life, primarily among the middle- or lower-class society, without romantic idealization or dramatization.[6] It may be regarded as the general attempt to depict subjects as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation and "in accordance with secular,empirical rules."[7] As such, the approach inherently implies a belief that suchreality isontologically independent of man's conceptual schemes, linguistic practices and beliefs, and thus can be known (or knowable) to the artist, who can in turn represent this 'reality' faithfully. As literary criticIan Watt states inThe Rise of the Novel, modern realism "begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses" and as such "it has its origins inDescartes andLocke, and received its first full formulation byThomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century."[8]
In the Introduction toThe Human Comedy (1842) Balzac "claims that poetic creation and scientific creation are closely related activities, manifesting the tendency of realists towards taking over scientific methods".[9] The artists of realism used the achievements of contemporary science, the strictness and precision of the scientific method, in order to understand reality. The positivist spirit in science presupposes feeling contempt towards metaphysics, the cult of the fact, experiment and proof, confidence in science and the progress that it brings, as well as striving to give a scientific form to studying social and moral phenomena."[10]
In the late 18th centuryRomanticism was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the previousAge of Reason and a reaction against the scientificrationalization of nature found in the dominant philosophy of the 18th century,[11] as well as a reaction to theIndustrial Revolution.[12] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,[13] education[14] and thenatural sciences.[15]
19th-century realism was in its turn a reaction to Romanticism, and for this reason it is also commonly derogatorily referred to as traditional or "bourgeois realism".[16] However, not all writers ofVictorian literature produced works of realism.[17] The rigidities, conventions, and other limitations ofVictorian realism prompted in their turn the revolt ofmodernism. Starting around 1900, the driving motive of modernist literature was the criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and world view, which was countered with an antirationalist, antirealist and antibourgeois program.[16][18][19]
Social realism is an international art movement that includes the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and filmmakers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these conditions. While the movement's artistic styles vary from nation to nation, it almost always uses a form of descriptive or critical realism.[20]
Kitchen sink realism (or kitchen sink drama) is a term coined to describe aBritish cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s intheatre,art,novels,film andtelevision plays, which used a style ofsocial realism. Its protagonists usually could be described as angry young men, and it often depicted the domestic situations ofworking-class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimypubs, to explore social issues and political controversies.
The films, plays and novels employing this style are set frequently in poorer industrial areas in theNorth of England, and use the rough-hewn speakingaccents andslang heard in those regions. The filmIt Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a precursor of the genre, and theJohn Osborne playLook Back in Anger (1956) is thought of as the first of the genre. The grittylove-triangle ofLook Back in Anger, for example, takes place in a cramped, one-room flat in theEnglish Midlands. The conventions of the genre have continued into the 2000s, finding expression in such television shows asCoronation Street andEastEnders.[21]
In art, "Kitchen Sink School" was a term used by criticDavid Sylvester to describe painters who depictedsocial realist–type scenes of domestic life.[22]
Socialist realism is the officialSoviet art form that was institutionalized byJoseph Stalin in 1934 and was later adopted by alliedCommunist parties worldwide.[20] This form of realism held that successful art depicts and glorifies theproletariat's struggle toward socialist progress. The Statute of theUnion of Soviet Writers in 1934 stated that socialist realism
is the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.[23]
The strict adherence to the above tenets, however, began to crumble after the death of Stalin when writers started expanding the limits of what is possible. However, the changes were gradual since the social realism tradition was so ingrained into the psyche of the Soviet literati that even dissidents followed the habits of this type of composition, rarely straying from its formal and ideological mold.[24] The Soviet socialist realism did not exactly emerge on the very day it was promulgated in the Soviet Union in 1932 by way of a decree that abolished independent writers' organizations. This movement had existed for at least fifteen years and was first seen during theBolshevik Revolution. The 1934 declaration only formalized its canonical formulation through the speeches of theAndrei Zhdanov, the representative of the Party's Central Committee.
The official definition of socialist realism has been criticized for its conflicting framework. While the concept itself is simple, discerning scholars struggle in reconciling its elements. According to Peter Kenez, "it was impossible to reconcile the teleological requirement with realistic presentation," further stressing that "the world could either be depicted as it was or as it should be according to theory, but the two are obviously not the same."[25]
Naturalism was a literary movement or tendency from the 1880s to 1930s that used detailedrealism to suggest that social conditions,heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was a mainly unorganizedliterary movement that sought to depictbelievableeveryday reality, as opposed to such movements asRomanticism orSurrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic or even supernatural treatment.
Naturalism was an outgrowth of literary realism, influenced byCharles Darwin's theory of evolution.[26] Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (e.g., the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects.[27] Naturalistic works often include supposed sordid subject matter, for example,Émile Zola's frank treatment ofsexuality, as well as pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works tend to focus on the darker aspects of life, including poverty,racism, violence, prejudice, disease, corruption,prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for focusing too much on human vice and misery.[28]
Protagonists of the genre were often (yet not always) poor, disadvantaged and scarcely educated people, who struggled against adversities. They often came from popular environments and their lifestyle was challenged by the progress that society was experiencing in the late 19th century; such characters usually could not adapt themselves to that progress. Other times, the protagonists wereBourgeois. Verismo was inspired by French Naturalism, but differed from it in a significant way: in fact, Naturalist authors were moreoptimistic and believed that literature could have an influence on society and its development, therefore conceived the writer's role as charged withmoral responsibilities and this is reflected in their works, which usually present comments by the authors and digressions where they express their opinion about the way their characters act. This does not happen in Verismo: in fact, Verist authors such as Giovanni Verga usually believe that reality cannot be changed through literature, so they do not make any comment on their characters and tend to distance themselves from the narration, by adopting an objective, non-intrusive perspective (yet the authors somehow manage to let the readers understand their point of view). A typical feature of Verismo is the usage of a language which coincides with the characters' social condition and their level of education: therefore, if the protagonists of the story are e.g., peasants, they will use a popular,lowbrow language;middle class characters will speak in a higher, more raffinate way. The works often present terms deriving fromvernaculars andregional Italian, especiallySicilian.
Historical realism is a writing style or sub-genre ofrealistic fiction centered around historical events and time periods. In historical realism, the structure and context of a text is usually solely derived from a real historical event or time period. As a consequence of this, many texts that fall under this category are philosophical by nature.[29]
In the early nineteenth century, there was growing impetus to establish an Australian culture that was separate from its English Colonial beginnings.[30] Common artistic motifs and characters that were represented in Australian realism were theAustralian Outback, known simply as "the bush", in its harsh and volatile beauty, the British settlers, theIndigenous Australian, thesquatter and thedigger—although some of these bordered into a moremythic territory in much of Australia's art scene. A significant portion of Australia's early realism was a rejection of, according to what theSydney Bulletin called in 1881 a "romantic identity" of the country.[31]
Most of the earliest writing in the colony was not literature in the most recent international sense, but rather journals and documentations of expeditions and environments, although literary style and preconceptions entered into the journal writing. Oftentimes in early Australian literature, romanticism and realism co-existed,[31] as exemplified byJoseph Furphy'sSuch Is Life (1897)–a fictional account of the life of rural dwellers, includingbullock drivers, squatters and itinerant travellers, in southernNew South Wales andVictoria, during the 1880s.Catherine Helen Spence'sClara Morison (1854), which detailed a Scottish woman's immigration toAdelaide, South Australia, in a time when many people were leaving the freely settled state of South Australia to claim fortunes in the gold rushes of Victoria and New South Wales.
The burgeoning literary concept that Australia was an extension of another, more distant country, was beginning to infiltrate into writing: "[those] who have at last understood the significance of Australian history as a transplanting of stocks and the sending down of roots in a new soil".Henry Handel Richardson, author of post-Federation novels such asMaurice Guest (1908) andThe Getting of Wisdom (1910), was said to have been heavily influenced by French and Scandinavian realism. In the twentieth century, as the working-class community ofSydney proliferated, the focus was shifted from the bush archetype to a more urban, inner-city setting:William Lane'sThe Working Man's Paradise (1892),Christina Stead'sSeven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) andRuth Park'sThe Harp in the South (1948) all depicted the harsh, gritty reality of working class Sydney.[32]Patrick White's novelsTree of Man (1955) andVoss (1957) fared particularly well and in 1973 White was awarded theNobel Prize in Literature.[33][34]
A new kind of literary realism emerged in the late twentieth century, helmed byHelen Garner'sMonkey Grip (1977) which revolutionised contemporary fiction in Australia, though it has since emerged that the novel wasdiaristic and based on Garner's own experiences.Monkey Grip concerns itself with a single-mother living in a succession ofMelbourne share-houses, as she navigates her increasingly obsessive relationship with a drug addict who drifts in and out of her life. A sub-set of realism emerged in Australia's literary scene known as "dirty realism", typically written by "new, young authors"[35] who examined "gritty, dirty, real existences",[35] of lower-income young people, whose lives revolve around anihilistic pursuit of casualsex,recreational drug use andalcohol, which are used to escapeboredom. Examples of dirty-realism includeAndrew McGahan'sPraise (1992),Christos Tsiolkas'sLoaded (1995),Justine Ettler'sThe River Ophelia (1995) andBrendan Cowell'sHow It Feels (2010), although many of these, including their predecessorMonkey Grip, are now labelled with a genre coined in 1995 as "grunge lit".[36]
Ian Watt inThe Rise of the Novel (1957) saw the novel as originating in the early 18th-century and he argued that the novel's 'novelty' was its 'formal realism': the idea 'that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience'.[37] His examples arenovelistsDaniel Defoe,Samuel Richardson andHenry Fielding. Watt argued that the novel's concern with realistically described relations between ordinary individuals, ran parallel to the more general development of philosophical realism, middle-class economic individualism and Puritan individualism. He also claims that the form addressed the interests and capacities of the new middle-class reading public and the new book trade evolving in response to them. As tradesmen themselves, Defoe and Richardson had only to 'consult their own standards' to know that their work would appeal to a large audience.[38]
Later in the 19th centuryGeorge Eliot's (1819–1880)Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), described bynovelistsMartin Amis andJulian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language, is a work of realism.[39][40] Through the voices and opinions of different characters the reader becomes aware of important issues of the day, including theReform Bill of 1832, the beginnings of the railways, and the state of contemporary medical science.Middlemarch also shows the deeply reactionary mindset within a settled community facing the prospect of what to many is unwelcome social, political and technological change.
WhileGeorge Gissing (1857–1903), author ofNew Grub Street (1891), amongst many other works, has traditionally been viewed as a naturalist, mainly influenced byÉmile Zola,[41] Jacob Korg has suggested thatGeorge Eliot was a greater influence.[42]
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was the first American author to bringa realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States.[45] His stories of middle and upper class life set in the 1880s and 1890s are highly regarded among scholars of American fiction.[citation needed] His most popular novel,The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), depicts a man who, ironically, falls from materialistic fortune by his own mistakes.
One of the earliest examples of realism wasJosiah Gilbert Holland’s second novel,Miss Gilbert’s Career, published “a full decade before any of the so-called pioneer American realistic novelists begin to publish.“ The 1860 novel “anticipated these much abler and more penetrating realists.“[46] This includes Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), better known by his pen name ofMark Twain, author ofAdventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884),[47][48] andStephen Crane (1871–1900).
Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm. For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not merely a literary technique: It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions. Crane was primarily a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays. Crane saw life at its rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His hauntingCivil War novel,The Red Badge of Courage, was published to great acclaim in 1895, but he barely had time to bask in the attention before he died, at 28, having neglected his health. He has enjoyed continued success ever since—as a champion of the common man, a realist, and a symbolist. Crane'sMaggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), is one of the best, if not the earliest, naturalistic American novel. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensitive young girl whose uneducated, alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love, and eager to escape her violent home life, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive but soon dies. Crane's earthy subject matter and his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, earmark Maggie as a naturalist work.[49]
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is the most prominent representative of 19th-century realism in fiction through the inclusion of specific detail and recurring characters.[50][51][52] HisLa Comédie humaine, a vast collection of nearly 100 novels, was the most ambitious scheme ever devised by a writer of fiction—nothing less than a complete contemporary history of his countrymen. Realism is also an important aspect of the works ofAlexandre Dumas, fils (1824–1895).
Many of the novels in this period, including Balzac's, were published in newspapers inserial form, and the immensely popular realist "roman feuilleton" tended to specialize in portraying the hidden side of urban life (crime, police spies, criminal slang), as in the novels ofEugène Sue. Similar tendencies appeared in the theatricalmelodramas of the period and, in an even more lurid and gruesome light, in theGrand Guignol at the end of the century.Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872), known today as the "national author of Finland", wrote his only novelThe Seven Brothers (1870), which was strongly influenced byCervantes,[53] and which received at time a very negative reception from critics because its contemporary descriptions of the life of a Finnishpeasants in an unadorned realism, long before the work achieved the status of a national novel.[54]
Gustave Flaubert's (1821–1880) acclaimed novelsMadame Bovary (1857), which reveals the tragic consequences of romanticism on the wife of a provincial doctor, andSentimental Education (1869) represent perhaps the highest stages in the development of French realism. Flaubert also wrote other works in an entirely different style and his romanticism is apparent in the fantasticThe Temptation of Saint Anthony (final version published 1874) and the baroque and exotic scenes of ancientCarthage inSalammbô (1862).
Theatrical realism was a generalmovement in19th-century theatre from the time period of 1870–1960 that developed a set of dramatic and theatricalconventions with the aim of bringing a greater fidelity of real life to texts and performances. Part ofa broader artistic movement, it shared many stylistic choices withnaturalism, including a focus on everyday (middle-class) drama, ordinary speech, and dull settings. Realism and naturalism diverge chiefly on the degree of choice that characters have: while naturalism believes in the overall strength of external forces over internal decisions, realism asserts the power of the individual to choose (seeA Doll's House).
19th-century realism is closely connected to the development of modern drama, which, as Martin Harrison explains, "is usually said to have begun in the early 1870s" with the "middle-period" work of the Norwegian dramatistHenrik Ibsen. Ibsen's realistic drama in prose has been "enormously influential."[57]
Inopera,verismo refers to a post-Romantic Italian tradition that sought to incorporate the naturalism of Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen. It included realistic – sometimes sordid or violent – depictions of contemporary everyday life, especially the life of the lower classes.
In France in addition tomelodramas, popular and bourgeois theater in the mid-century turned to realism in the "well-made" bourgeois farces ofEugène Marin Labiche and the moral dramas ofÉmile Augier.
Critics of realism cite that depicting reality is not often realistic, with some observers calling it "imaginary" or "project[ed]".[58] This argument is based on the idea that we do not often understand what is real correctly. To present reality, we draw on what is "real" according to how we remember it as well as how we experience it. However, remembered or experienced reality does not always correspond to what the truth is. Instead, we often obtain a distorted version of it that is only related to what is out there or how things really are. Realism is criticized for its supposed inability to address this challenge and such failure is seen as tantamount to complicity in a creating a process wherein "the artefactual nature of reality is overlooked or even concealed."[59] According toCatherine Gallagher, realistic fiction invariably undermines, in practice, the ideology it purports to exemplify because if appearances were self-sufficient, there would probably be no need for novels.[58] This can be demonstrated in literary naturalism's focus in the United States during the late nineteenth century on the larger forces that determine the lives of its characters, as depicted in agricultural machines portrayed as immense and terrible, shredding "entangled" human bodies without compunction.[60] The machines were used as ametaphor, but the metaphor contributed to the perception that such narratives were more like myth than reality.[60]
There are also critics who fault realism in the way it supposedly defines itself as a reaction to the excesses of literary genres such as Romanticism and the Gothic – those that focus on the exotic, sentimental, and sensational narratives.[61] Some scholars began to call this an impulse to contradict so that in the end, the limit that it imposes on itself leads to "either the representation of verifiable and objective truth or the merely relative, some partial, subjective truth, therefore no truth at all."[62]
There are also critics who cite the absence of a fixed definition. The argument is that there is no pure form of realism and the position that it is almost impossible to find literature that is not in fact realist, at least to some extent while, and that whenever one searches for pure realism, it vanishes.[63]J.P. Stern countered this position when he maintained that this "looseness" or "untidiness" makes the term indispensable in common and literary discourse alike.[58] Others also dismiss it as obvious and simple-minded while denying realistic aesthetic, branding as pretentious since it is considered merereportage,[64] not art, and based on naïvemetaphysics.[65]
^David Levin,History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, and Parkman (1967)
^Gerald Lee Gutek,A history of the Western educational experience (1987) ch. 12 onJohann Heinrich Pestalozzi
^Ashton Nichols, "Roaring Alligators and Burning Tygers: Poetry and Science from William Bartram to Charles Darwin,"Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 2005 149(3): 304–315
^Gerald Graff (1975)Babbitt at the Abyss: The Social Context of Postmodern. American Fiction,TriQuarterly, No. 33 (Spring 1975), pp. 307-37; reprinted in Putz and Freese, eds., Postmodernism and American Literature.
^Gerald Graff (1973)The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough,TriQuarterly, 26 (Winter, 1973) 383-417; rept inThe Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction Malcolm Bradbury, ed., (London: Fontana, 1977); reprinted in Proza Nowa Amerykanska, ed., Szice Krytyczne (Warsaw, Poland, 1984); reprinted inPostmodernism in American Literature: A Critical Anthology, Manfred Putz and Peter Freese, eds., (Darmstadt: Thesen Verlag, 1984), 58-81.
^abTodd, James G. (2009)."Social Realism".Art Terms. Museum of Modern Art. Archived fromthe original on 2015-05-14. Retrieved6 February 2013.
^Heilpern, John.John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man, New York: Knopf, 2007.
^Walker, John. (1992)"Kitchen Sink School".Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design since 1945, 3rd. ed. Retrieved 20 January 2012.
^abLeishman, Kirsty (1999). "Australian grunge literature and the conflict between literary generations".Journal of Australian Studies.23 (63):94–102.doi:10.1080/14443059909387538.
^"A Case for Literature"(PDF).Australian Council for the Arts. May 2010. p. 56. Retrieved2 April 2018.
^Watt, I. (1963).The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 32.
^Watt, I. (1963).The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 61.
^Long, Camilla.Martin Amis and the sex war[dead link],The Times, 24 January 2010, p. 4: "They've [women] produced the greatest writer in the English language ever, George Eliot, and arguably the third greatest, Jane Austen, and certainly the greatest novel, Middlemarch."
^Becker, Sabine (2003).Bürgerlicher Realismus; Literatur und Kultur im bürgerlichen Zeitalter 1848–1900 (in German). Tübingen: Francke.;McInnes, Edward; Plumpe, Gerhard, eds. (1996).Bürgerlicher Realismus und Gründerzeit 1848–1890 (in German). Munich: Carl Hanser.
^Brockett and Hildy (2003, 370, 372) and Benedetti (2005, 100) and (1999, 14-17).
^abcNovak, Daniel (2008).Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 154.ISBN9780521885256.
^Tallis, Raymond (1988).In Defence of Realism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. p. 44.ISBN0803294352.
^abBarrish, Phillip (2011).The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 118.ISBN9780521897693.
^Kearns, Katherine (1996).Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 43.ISBN0521496063.
^Byerly, Alison (1997).Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 4.ISBN0521581168.
^Yee, Jennifer (2016).The Colonial Comedy: Imperialism in the French Realist Novel. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 212.ISBN9780198722632.
^Carroll, Noël (2010).Art in Three Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 469.ISBN9780199559312.
^Becker, George (1967).Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 3.ISBN9781400874644.
