Realism PDF

Realism Introduction: Realism as a movement in literature was a post-1848 phenomenon. The literary realism aims to reproduce in third person "objective reality" that means reality by portraying mundane, everyday experiences, quotidian activities as they are in real life. It depicts f...

Realism Introduction: Realism as a movement in literature was a post-1848 phenomenon. The literary realism aims to reproduce in third person "objective reality" that means reality by portraying mundane, everyday experiences, quotidian activities as they are in real life. It depicts familiar people, places, and stories, primarily about the middle and lower classes of society. Literary realism seeks to tell a story as truthfully as possible instead of dramatizing or romanticizing it. (No embellishment and the focus was on secular and empirical rules). It began as a reaction to 18th century Romanticism and the rise of the bourgeois in Europe. Works of Romanticism were thought to be too exotic and to have lost touch with the real world. Realism in France The roots of literary realism lie in France. Balzac and Flaubert were the major French Realists. 1. Honoré de Balzac: infused his writing with complex characters and detailed observations about society 2. Gustave Flaubert: established realist narration in his Madame Bovary (1857) as we know it today. ## Naturalism- a more pessimistic and analytical form of realism, which seeks to explain human behavior as intrinsically linked with the environment. French novelist Émile Zola declared Balzac the father of the naturalist novel. Zola indicated that whilst the Romantics saw the world through a colored lens, the naturalist sees through a clear glass Realism in England 1. George Eliot 1. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871) the greatest novel of Realism in the English language 2. George Gissing (1857-1903) 1. New Grub Street (1891) traditionally viewed as a naturalist, mainly influenced by Émile Zola 3. Arnold Bennett 1. Clayhanger trilogy (1910-18) 2. The Old Wives' Tale (1908). These books draw on his experience of life in the Staffordshire Potteries, an industrial area encompassing the six towns. 4. George Moore Esther Waters (1894), was also influenced by the naturalism of Zola. 21  Realism in America NOVELIST Novel 1. William Dean Howells (1837 -1920) 1. A Modern Instance (1882) The first American realist author, who was known for 2. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) writing novels about middle-class life. 2. Mark Twain (1835- 1910) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) Real name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens It was the first time a novel captured the distinctive life praised as the "greatest humorist and voice of middle America (Mississippi riverside). the United States has produced" William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature" 3. Stephen Crane The Red Badge of Courage ( 1895 Civil War novel) told the real but previously untold stories of life on the battlefield. These stories encouraged more American writers to use their voices to speak truth to the real conditions of what life was really like, whether at war or in poverty. 4. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939) 5. Upton Sinclair The Jungle The Brass Check Sylvia novels 6. Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence, 1920 7. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady a key transitional figure The Ambassadors between literary realism and literary modernism The Wings of the Dove 22