Literary realism

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses, see Realism (disambiguation).

Literary realism is a

nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal) and Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin).[1] Literary realism attempts to represent familiar things as they are. Realist
authors chose to depict every day and banal activities and experiences.

Background

Broadly defined as "the representation of reality",

realism art movement in painting began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution.[5] The realist painters rejected Romanticism
, 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 "

ontologically 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 critic Ian Watt states in The 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 in Descartes and Locke, and received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century."[8]

In the Introduction to The 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 century

natural 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".

modernism. 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]

Sub-genres of literary realism

Social Realism

See also: Social novel

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 a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, which used a style of social realism. Its protagonists usually could be described as angry young men, and it often depicted the domestic situations of working-class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues and political controversies.

The films, plays and novels employing this style are set frequently in poorer industrial areas in the

English Midlands. The conventions of the genre have continued into the 2000s, finding expression in such television shows as Coronation Street and EastEnders.[21]

In art, "Kitchen Sink School" was a term used by critic

social realist–type scenes of domestic life.[22]

Socialist realism

See also: Proletarian literature

Communist parties worldwide.[20] This form of realism held that successful art depicts and glorifies the proletariat's struggle toward socialist progress. The Statute of the Union 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 the Bolshevik Revolution. The 1934 declaration only formalized its canonical formulation through the speeches of the Andrei 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

See also:
Naturalism in 19th-century French literature

literary movement that sought to depict believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism
, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic or even supernatural treatment.

Naturalism was an outgrowth of literary realism, influenced by Charles 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 of sexuality, 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]

Verismo

Main article: Verismo (literature)

Verismo (from Italian vero, meaning 'true, real') was an Italian literary movement which aimed to describe reality. Its main representatives were Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, regarded as the authors of a "manifesto" of the genre. Among other exponents were Matilde Serao and 1926 Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda (see main article for more).

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 progresses that society was experimenting in late XIX century; such characters usually could not get to adapt themselves to the progress. Other times, the protagonists were

moral 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 from vernaculars and regional Italian, especially Sicilian
.

Realism in the novel

Australia

In the early nineteenth century, there was growing impetus to establish an Australian culture that was separate from its English Colonial beginnings.

Sydney Bulletin called in 1881 a "romantic identity" of the country.[30]

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,

Adelaide, 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 as Maurice Guest (1908) and The 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 of Sydney proliferated, the focus was shifted from the bush archetype to a more urban, inner-city setting: William Lane's The Working Man's Paradise (1892), Christina Stead's Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) and Ruth Park's The Harp in the South (1948) all depicted the harsh, gritty reality of working class Sydney.[31] Patrick White's novels Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957) fared particularly well and in 1973 White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.[32][33]

A new kind of literary realism emerged in the late twentieth century, helmed by Helen Garner's Monkey Grip (1977) which revolutionised contemporary fiction in Australia, though it has since emerged that the novel was diaristic and based on Garner's own experiences. Monkey Grip concerns itself with a single-mother living in a succession of Melbourne 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"[34] who examined "gritty, dirty, real existences",[34] of lower-income young people, whose lives revolve around a nihilistic pursuit of casual sex, recreational drug use and alcohol, which are used to escape boredom. Examples of dirty-realism include Andrew McGahan's Praise (1992), Christos Tsiolkas's Loaded (1995), Justine Ettler's The River Ophelia (1995) and Brendan Cowell's How It Feels (2010), although many of these, including their predecessor Monkey Grip, are now labelled with a genre coined in 1995 as "grunge lit".[35]

United Kingdom

novelists Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry 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.[37]

Later in the 19th century

Reform 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.

While George Gissing (1857–1903), author of New Grub Street (1891), amongst many other works, has traditionally been viewed as a naturalist, mainly influenced by Émile Zola,[40] Jacob Korg has suggested that George Eliot was a greater influence.[41]

Other novelists, such as

Anglo-Irishman George Moore (1852–1933), consciously imitated the French realists.[42] Bennett's most famous works are the Clayhanger trilogy (1910–18) and The Old Wives' Tale (1908). These books draw on his experience of life in the Staffordshire Potteries, an industrial area encompassing the six towns that now make up Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. George Moore, whose most famous work is Esther Waters (1894), was also influenced by the naturalism of Zola.[43]

United States

a realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States.[44] 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 was Josiah 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.“[45] This includes Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884),[46][47] and Stephen 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 haunting Civil 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's Maggie: 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.[48]

Other later American realists are John Steinbeck, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Edith Wharton and Henry James.

Europe

Benito Pérez Galdós, Spanish writer from the Canary Islands

Alexandre Dumas, fils
(1824–1895).

Many of the novels in this period, including Balzac's, were published in newspapers in

Cervantes,[52] and which received at time a very negative reception from critics because its contemporary descriptions of the life of a Finnish peasants in an unadorned realism, long before the work achieved the status of a national novel.[53]

Salammbô
(1862).

In German literature, 19th-century realism developed under the name of "Poetic Realism" or "Bourgeois Realism," and major figures include Theodor Fontane, Gustav Freytag, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, Adalbert Stifter, and Theodor Storm.[54]

In

Nobel Prize for Literature
.

Later realist writers included

José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Bolesław Prus and, in a sense, Émile Zola, whose naturalism is often regarded as an offshoot of realism.[citation needed
]

Realism in the theatre

Theatrical realism was a general movement in 19th-century theatre from the time period of 1870–1960 that developed a set of dramatic and theatrical conventions with the aim of bringing a greater fidelity of real life to texts and performances. Part of a broader artistic movement, it shared many stylistic choices with naturalism, 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 (see A Doll's House
).

Russia's first professional playwright,

'system'
, a form of actor training that is particularly suited to psychological realism.

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 dramatist Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen's realistic drama in prose has been "enormously influential."[56]

In opera, 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 to

Eugène Marin Labiche and the moral dramas of Émile Augier
.

Criticism

Critics of realism cite that depicting reality is not often realistic with some observers calling it "imaginary" or "project".[57] This argument is based on the idea that we do not often get 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."[58] According to Catherine 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.[57] This can be demonstrated in the 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.[59] The machines were used as a metaphor but it contributed to the perception that such narratives were more like myth than reality.[59]

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.[60] 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."[61]

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.[62] J.P. Stern countered this position when he maintained that this "looseness" or "untidiness" makes the term indispensable in common and literary discourse alike.[57] Others also dismiss it as obvious and simple-minded while denying realistic aesthetic, branding as pretentious since it is considered mere reportage,[63] not art, and based on naïve metaphysics.[64]

See also

  • Chanson réaliste (realist song), a style of music which was directly influenced by realist literary movement in France
  • Verismo, an application of the tenets of realism to (especially late-romantic Italian) opera.

Notes

  1. ^ Champfleury, Jule-Français (1857). Le Realisme. Paris: Michel Lévy. p. 2.
  2. ^ Donna M. Campbell. "Realism in American Literature". Wsu.edu. Retrieved 2014-07-15.
  3. ISBN 978-0-19-064289-1
    .
  4. ISBN 0-7735-1704-9
    .
  5. ^ "Metropolitan Museum of Art". Metmuseum.org. 2014-06-02. Retrieved 2014-07-15.
  6. ^ "Realism definition of Realism in the Free Online Encyclopedia". Encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com. Retrieved 2014-07-15.
  7. ^ in so far as such subjects are "explicable in terms of natural causation without resort to supernatural or divine intervention" Morris, 2003. p. 5
  8. ^ Watt, 1957, p.12
  9. ISBN 978-1-7936-0911-3
    .
  10. ISBN 978-1-7936-0910-6
    .
  11. ^ Casey, Christopher (October 30, 2008). ""Grecian Grandeurs and the Rude Wasting of Old Time": Britain, the Elgin Marbles, and Post-Revolutionary Hellenism". Foundations. Volume III, Number 1. Archived from the original on May 13, 2009. Retrieved 2014-05-14.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  12. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. "Romanticism. Retrieved 30 January 2008, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online". Britannica.com. Retrieved 2010-08-24.
  13. ^ David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, and Parkman (1967)
  14. ^ Gerald Lee Gutek, A history of the Western educational experience (1987) ch. 12 on Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
  15. ^ 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
  16. ^
    The Literature of Replenishment, later republished in The Friday Book
    ' '(1984).
  17. ^ "Victorian Literature". The Literature Network. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  18. ^ 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.
  19. ^ Gerald Graff (1973) The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough, TriQuarterly, 26 (Winter, 1973) 383-417; rept in The 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 in Postmodernism in American Literature: A Critical Anthology, Manfred Putz and Peter Freese, eds., (Darmstadt: Thesen Verlag, 1984), 58-81.
  20. ^ a b Todd, James G. (2009). "Social Realism". Art Terms. Museum of Modern Art. Archived from the original on 2015-05-14. Retrieved 6 February 2013.
  21. ^ Heilpern, John. John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man, New York: Knopf, 2007.
  22. ^ Walker, John. (1992) "Kitchen Sink School". Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design since 1945, 3rd. ed. Retrieved 20 January 2012.
  23. ISBN 0-520-04677-3
    , p.148.
  24. ISBN 9781134569076
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  25. ISBN 0521428637
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  26. ISBN 0-00-686150-4
    .
  27. OCLC 149085143.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
    )
  28. ISBN 9780691165783
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  29. ISBN 978-1-921867-60-6
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  30. ^ a b "Cultural Transmission and Australian Literature: 1788-1998". Studies in Australian Literary History: 29–71 [45]. 2014. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  31. ^ Maunder, Patricia (17 December 2010). "Novelist shone a light on slums". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
  32. ^ "Australian Nobel Prize Winners". Whitehat.com.au. 2 December 2006. Archived from the original on 2 September 2011. Retrieved 1 September 2011.
  33. ^ "Australian authors shortlisted for lost Man Booker Prize". The Sydney Morning Herald. 26 March 2010. Retrieved 7 April 2010.
  34. ^
    doi:10.1080/14443059909387538
    .
  35. ^ "A Case for Literature" (PDF). Australian Council for the Arts. May 2010. p. 56. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  36. ^ Watt, I. (1963). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 32.
  37. ^ Watt, I. (1963). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 61.
  38. ^ Long, Camilla. Martin Amis and the sex war, 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."
  39. ^ Guppy, Shusha. "Interviews: Julian Barnes, The Art of Fiction No. 165". The Paris Review (Winter 2000). Retrieved 26 May 2012.
  40. ^ Keary, C. F. (1904). "George Gissing," The Athenaeum, Vol. XVI, p. 82.
  41. JSTOR 4610542
    .
  42. ^ The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1985)1996, p.824
  43. ISBN 0-8264-8883-8
  44. ^ "Romance - AN OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY - Wisconsin Public Library Consortium - OverDrive". Wisconsin Public Library Consortium. Retrieved 2020-02-04.
  45. ^ Peckham, Harry Houston. Josiah Gilbert Holland in Relation to His Times. United Kingdom, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940, p.136.
  46. ^ "Protected Blog › Log in". matthewasprey.wordpress.com.
  47. Scribners
    . p. 22.
  48. ^ Holton, Milne. Cylinder of Fiction. - The Fiction and Journalistic Writing of Stephen Crane. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1972. 37.
  49. LCCN 75-76005
    .
  50. ISBN 0-691-06567-5
    .
  51. ISBN 0-333-24438-9
    .
  52. ^ The man and his work – Books from Finland
  53. ^ "Aleksis Kiven valtava klassikko sai ilmestyessään poikkeuksellisen teilauksen: "Poeettinen peräsuoli"". Ilta-Sanomat (in Finnish). 6 October 2018. Retrieved 22 September 2022.
  54. ^ 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.
  55. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 370, 372) and Benedetti (2005, 100) and (1999, 14-17).
  56. ^ Harrison (1998, 160).
  57. ^
    ISBN 9780521885256
    .
  58. ISBN 0803294352
    .
  59. ^
    ISBN 9780521897693
    .
  60. ISBN 0521496063
    .
  61. ISBN 0521581168
    .
  62. ISBN 9780198722632
    .
  63. ISBN 9780199559312
    .
  64. ISBN 9781400874644
    .

External links
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