Literary realism

Literary realism is part of the realist art movement be-ginning with mid nineteenth-century French literature(Stendhal), and Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin)and extending to the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century. Literary realism, in contrast to idealism, at-tempts to represent familiar things as they are.[1] Realistauthors chose to depict everyday and banal activities andexperiences, instead of using a romanticized or similarlystylized presentation. Literary critic Ian Watt, however,dates the origins of realism in United Kingdom to theearly 18th-century novel.[2] Subsequent related develop-ments in the arts are naturalism, social realism, and in the1930s, socialist realism.

1 Background

Broadly defined as “the faithful representation ofreality”,[3] realism in the arts is the attempt to representsubject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoid-ing artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernat-ural elements.Realism has been prevalent in the arts at many periods,and is in large part a matter of technique and training, andthe avoidance of stylization. In the visual arts, illusionisticrealism is the accurate depiction of lifeforms, perspective,and the details of light and colour. Realist works of artmay emphasize the ugly or sordid, such as works of socialrealism, regionalism, or Kitchen sink realism.There have been various realism movements in the arts,such as the opera style of verismo, literary realism,theatrical realism and Italian neorealist cinema. Therealism art movement in painting began in France in the1850s, after the 1848 Revolution.[4] The realist paintersrejected Romanticism, which had come to dominateFrench literature and art, with roots in the late 18th cen-tury.Realism as a movement in literature was based on"objective reality", and focused on showing everyday,quotidian activities and life, primarily among the mid-dle or lower class society, without romantic idealizationor dramatization.[5] It may be regarded as the general at-tempt to depict subjects as they are considered to exist inthird person objective reality, without embellishment orinterpretation and “in accordance with secular, empiricalrules.”[6] As such, the approach inherently implies a be-lief that such reality is ontologically independent of man’sconceptual schemes, linguistic practices and beliefs, and

thus can be known (or knowable) to the artist, who canin turn represent this 'reality' faithfully. As literary criticIan Watt states in The Rise of the Novel, modern realism“begins from the position that truth can be discovered bythe individual through the senses” and as such “it has itsorigins in Descartes and Locke, and received its first fullformulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eigh-teenth century.”[7]

In the late 18th-century Romanticism was a revolt againstthe aristocratic social and political norms of the previ-ous Age of Reason and a reaction against the scientificrationalization of nature found in the dominant philoso-phy of the 18th-century,[8] as well as a reaction to theIndustrial Revolution.[9] It was embodied most stronglyin the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a majorimpact on historiography,[10] education[11] and the naturalsciences.[12]

19th-century realism was in its turn a reaction to Roman-ticism, and for this reason it is also commonly deroga-torily referred as traditional or “bourgeois realism”.[13]However, not all writers of Victorian literature producedworks of realism.[14] The rigidities, conventions, andother limitations of Victorian realism, prompted in theirturn the revolt of modernism. Starting around 1900, thedrivingmotive ofmodernist literature was the criticism ofthe 19th-century bourgeois social order and world view,which was countered with an antirationalist, antirealistand antibourgeois program.[13][15][16]

1.1 Social realism

See also: Social novel

Social Realism is an international art movement that in-cludes the work of painters, printmakers, photographersand filmmakers who draw attention to the everyday con-ditions of the working classes and the poor, and who arecritical of the social structures that maintain these con-ditions. While the movement’s artistic styles vary fromnation to nation, it almost always uses a form of descrip-tive or critical realism.[17]

Kitchen sink realism (or kitchen sink drama) is a termcoined to describe a British cultural movement that de-veloped in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre,art, novels, film and television plays, which used a styleof social realism. Its protagonists usually could be de-scribed as angry young men. and it often depicted thedomestic situations of working-class Britons living in

1

2 2 THE NOVEL

cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues andpolitical controversies.The films, plays and novels employing this style are setfrequently in poorer industrial areas in the North of Eng-land, and use the rough-hewn speaking accents and slangheard in those regions. The film It Always Rains on Sun-day (1947) is a precursor of the genre, and the John Os-borne play Look Back in Anger (1956) is thought of as thefirst of the genre. The gritty love-triangle of Look Back inAnger, for example, takes place in a cramped, one-roomflat in the EnglishMidlands. The conventions of the genrehave continued into the 2000s, finding expression in suchtelevision shows as Coronation Street and EastEnders.[18]

In art, “Kitchen Sink School” was a term used by criticDavid Sylvester to describe painters who depicted socialrealist–type scenes of domestic life.[19]

1.2 Socialist realism

See also: Proletarian literature

Socialist realism is the official Soviet art form that wasinstitutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934 and was lateradopted by allied Communist parties worldwide.[17] Thisform of realism held that successful art depicts and glo-rifies the proletariat's struggle toward socialist progress.The Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934 statedthat socialist realism

is the basic method of Soviet lit-erature and literary criticism. Itdemands of the artist the truthful,historically concrete representationof reality in its revolutionary de-velopment. Moreover, the truthful-ness and historical concreteness ofthe artistic representation of real-ity must be linked with the task ofideological transformation and ed-ucation of workers in the spirit ofsocialism.[20]

1.3 Naturalism

See also: Naturalism in 19th century French literature

Naturalism was a literary movement or tendency fromthe 1880s to 1930s that used detailed realism to suggestthat social conditions, heredity, and environment had in-escapable force in shaping human character. It was amainly unorganized literary movement that sought to de-pict believable everyday reality, as opposed to such move-ments as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects

may receive highly symbolic, idealistic or even supernat-ural treatment.Naturalism was an outgrowth of literary realism, a promi-nent literary movement in mid-19th-century France andelsewhere. Naturalistic writers were influenced byCharles Darwin's theory of evolution.[21] Whereas real-ism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are,naturalism also attempts to determine “scientifically” theunderlying forces (e.g., the environment or heredity) in-fluencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic worksoften include supposed sordid subject matter, for exam-ple, Émile Zola's frank treatment of sexuality, as well asa pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works tend to focuson the darker aspects of life, including poverty, racism,violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, andfilth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently crit-icized for focusing too much on human vice and misery.

2 The novel

2.1 United Kingdom

Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957) saw the novelas originating in the early 18th-century and he arguedthat the novel’s 'novelty' was its 'formal realism': the idea'that the novel is a full and authentic report of humanexperience'.[2] His examples are novelists Daniel Defoe,Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Watt argued thatthe novel’s concern with realistically described relationsbetween ordinary individuals, ran parallel to the moregeneral development of philosophical realism, middle-class economic individualism and Puritan individualism.He also claims that the form addressed the interests andcapacities of the new middle-class reading public and thenew book trade evolving in response to them. As trades-men themselves, Defoe and Richardson had only to 'con-sult their own standards’ to know that their work wouldappeal to a large audience.[22]

Later in the 19th-century George Eliot's (1819 – 1880)Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871-2), de-scribed by novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes asthe greatest novel in the English language, is a work ofrealism.[23] [24] Through the voices and opinions of dif-ferent characters the reader become aware of importantissues of the day, including the Reform Bill, of 1832, thebeginnings of the railways, and the state of contemporarymedical science. Middlemarch also shows the deeply re-actionary mindset within a settled community facing theprospect of what to many is unwelcome social, politicaland technological change.While George Gissing (1857-1903), author of New GrubStreet (1891), amongst many other works, has tradition-ally been viewed as a naturalist, mainly influenced byÉmile Zola,[25] Jacob Korg has suggested that GeorgeEliot was a greater influence.[26]

2.3 Europe 3

Other novelists, such as Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) andAnglo-Irishman George Moore (1852-1933) consciouslyimitated the French realists.[27] Bennett’s most famousworks are the Clayhanger trilogy (1910–18) and The OldWives’ Tale (1908). These books draw on his experienceof life in the Staffordshire Potteries, an industrial area en-compassing the six towns that now make up Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. George Moore, whosemost famous work is Esther Waters (1894), was also in-fluenced by the naturalism of Zola.[28]

2.2 American realism

William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920) was the first Amer-ican author to bring a realist aesthetic to the literatureof the United States. His stories of Boston upper crustlife set in the 1850s are highly regarded among schol-ars of American fiction. His most popular novel, TheRise of Silas Lapham (1885), depicts a man who, ironi-cally, falls frommaterialistic fortune by his ownmistakes.Other early American realists include Samuel Clemens(1835–1910), better known by his pen name of MarkTwain, author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1884),[29][30] Stephen Crane (1871–1900), and HoratioAlger, Jr. (1832–1899).Twain’s style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquialAmerican speech, gave American writers a new appre-ciation of their national voice. Twain was the first majorauthor to come from the interior of the country, and hecaptured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm.For Twain and other American writers of the late 19thcentury, realism was not merely a literary technique: Itwas a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out con-ventions. Crane was primarily a journalist who also wrotefiction, essays, poetry, and plays, Crane saw life at itsrawest, in slums and on battlefields. His haunting CivilWar novel, The Red Badge of Courage, was published togreat acclaim in 1895, but he barely had time to bask inthe attention before he died, at 28, having neglected hishealth. He has enjoyed continued success ever since—asa champion of the common man, a realist, and a sym-bolist. Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), isone of the best, if not the earliest, naturalistic Ameri-can novel. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensi-tive young girl whose uneducated, alcoholic parents ut-terly fail her. In love, and eager to escape her violenthome life, she allows herself to be seduced into livingwith a young man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prosti-tute to survive, but soon commits suicide out of despair.Crane’s earthy subject matter and his objective, scientificstyle, devoid of moralizing, earmark Maggie as a natural-ist work.[31] Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832–1899) was a pro-lific 19th-century American author whose principal out-put was formulaic rags-to-riches juvenile novels that fol-lowed the adventures of bootblacks, newsboys, peddlers,buskers, and other impoverished children in their rise

from humble backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort. His novels, of which RaggedDick is a typical example, were hugely popular in theirday.Other later American realists are: John Steinbeck, FrankNorris, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London,Edith Wharton and Henry James.

2.3 Europe

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is the most promi-nent representative of 19th century realism in fictionthrough the inclusion of specific detail and recurringcharacters.[32][33][34] His La Comédie humaine, a vast col-lection of nearly 100 novels, was the most ambitiousscheme ever devised by a writer of fiction—nothing lessthan a complete contemporary history of his country-men. Realism is also an important aspect of the worksof Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824 – 1895).Many of the novels in this period, including Balzac’s,were published in newspapers in serial form, and theimmensely popular realist “roman feuilleton” tended tospecialize in portraying the hidden side of urban life(crime, police spies, criminal slang), as in the novels ofEugène Sue. Similar tendencies appeared in the theatri-cal melodramas of the period and, in an even more luridand gruesome light, in the Grand Guignol at the end ofthe century.Gustave Flaubert's (1821–1880) acclaimed novelsMadame Bovary (1857), which reveals the tragic con-sequences of romanticism on the wife of a provincialdoctor, and Sentimental Education (1869) representperhaps the highest stages in the development of Frenchrealism. Flaubert also wrote other works in an entirelydifferent style and his romanticism is apparent in thefantastic The Temptation of Saint Anthony (final versionpublished 1874) and the baroque and exotic scenes ofancient Carthage in Salammbô (1862).In German literature, 19th-century realism developed un-der the name of “Poetic Realism” or “Bourgeois Real-ism,” and major figures include Theodor Fontane, GustavFreytag, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, AdalbertStifter, and Theodor Storm.[35]

Later realist writers included Benito Pérez Galdós, Guyde Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, José Maria de Eça deQueiroz, Machado de Assis, Bolesław Prus and, in asense, Émile Zola, whose naturalism is often regarded asan offshoot of realism.

3 The theatre

Theatrical realism was a general movement in 19th-century theatre from the time period of 1870-1960 thatdeveloped a set of dramatic and theatrical conventions

4 5 NOTES

with the aim of bringing a greater fidelity of real life totexts and performances. Part of a broader artistic move-ment, it shared many stylistic choices with naturalism, in-cluding a focus on everyday (middle-class) drama, ordi-nary speech, and dull settings. Realism and naturalismdiverge chiefly on the degree of choice that charactershave: while naturalism believes in the overall strength ofexternal forces over internal decisions, realism asserts thepower of the individual to choose (see A Doll’s House).Russia’s first professional playwright, Aleksey Pisemsky,and Leo Tolstoy (The Power of Darkness (1886)), began atradition of psychological realism in Russia which culmi-nated with the establishment of the Moscow Art Theatreby Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.[36] Their ground-breaking productions of theplays of Anton Chekhov in turn influencedMaximGorkyand Mikhail Bulgakov. Stanislavski went on to develophis 'system', a form of actor training that is particularlysuited to psychological realism.19th-century realism is closely connected to the develop-ment of modern drama, which, as Martin Harrison ex-plains, “is usually said to have begun in the early 1870s”with the “middle-period” work of the Norwegian drama-tist Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen’s realistic drama in prose hasbeen “enormously influential.”[37]

In opera, verismo refers to a post-Romantic Italian tra-dition that sought to incorporate the naturalism of ÉmileZola and Henrik Ibsen. It included realistic – sometimessordid or violent – depictions of contemporary everydaylife, especially the life of the lower classes.In France in addition to melodramas, popular and bour-geois theater in the mid-century turned to realism in the“well-made” bourgeois farces of Eugène Marin Labicheand the moral dramas of Émile Augier.

4 See also• Chanson réaliste (realist song), a style of musicwhich was directly influenced by realist literarymovement in France

• History of modern literature

5 Notes[1] “Realism” in the Oxford Dictionary

[2] Watt, I. (1963). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in De-foe, Richardson and Fielding, Harmondsworth: Penguin,p. 32.

[3] Donna M. Campbell. “Realism in American Literature”.Wsu.edu. Retrieved 2014-07-15.

[4] “Metropolitan Museum of Art”. Metmuseum.org. 2014-06-02. Retrieved 2014-07-15.

[5] “Realism definition of Realism in the Free Online En-cyclopedia”. Encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com. Re-trieved 2014-07-15.

[6] in so far as such subjects are “explicable in terms of nat-ural causation without resort to supernatural or divine in-tervention” Morris, 2003. p. 5

[7] Watt, 1957, p.12

[8] Casey, Christopher (October 30, 2008). ""GrecianGrandeurs and the Rude Wasting of Old Time": Britain,the Elgin Marbles, and Post-Revolutionary Hellenism”.Foundations. Volume III, Number 1. Retrieved 2014-05-14.

[9] Encyclopædia Britannica. "''Romanticism''. Retrieved30 January 2008, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online”.Britannica.com. Retrieved 2010-08-24.

[10] David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott,and Parkman (1967)

[11] Gerald Lee Gutek, A history of the Western educationalexperience (1987) ch. 12 on Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

[12] Ashton Nichols, “Roaring Alligators and Burning Tygers:Poetry and Science fromWilliamBartram to Charles Dar-win,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society2005 149(3): 304–315

[13] John Barth (1979) The Literature of Replenishment, laterrepublished in The Friday Book' '(1984).

[14] “Victorian Literature”. The Literature Network. Re-trieved 7 October 2013.

[15] Gerald Graff (1975) Babbitt at the Abyss: The Social Con-text of Postmodern. American Fiction, TriQuarterly, No.33 (Spring 1975), pp. 307-37; reprinted in Putz andFreese, eds., Postmodernism and American Literature.

[16] Gerald Graff (1973) TheMyth of the Postmodernist Break-through, TriQuarterly, 26 (Winter, 1973) 383-417; rept inThe Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fic-tion Malcolm Bradbury, ed., (London: Fontana, 1977);reprinted in Proza Nowa Amerykanska, ed., Szice Kryty-czne (Warsaw, Poland, 1984); reprinted in Postmodernismin American Literature: A Critical Anthology, ManfredPutz and Peter Freese, eds., (Darmstadt: Thesen Verlag,1984), 58-81.

[17] Todd, James G. (2009). “Social Realism”. Art Terms.Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 6 February 2013.

[18] Heilpern, John. John Osborne: The Many Lives of the An-gry Young Man, New York: Knopf, 2007.

[19] Walker, John. (1992) “Kitchen Sink School”. Glossary ofArt, Architecture & Design since 1945, 3rd. ed. Retrieved20 January 2012.

[20] On Socialist Realism” by Andrei Sinyavsky writing asAbram Tertz ISBN 0-520-04677-3, p.148.

[21] Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary ofCulture and Society. London: Fontana, 1988, p. 217.ISBN 0-00-686150-4.

5

[22] Watt, I. (1963). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in De-foe, Richardson and Fielding, Harmondsworth: Penguin,p. 61.

[23] Long, Camilla. Martin Amis and the sex war, The Times,24 January 2010, p. 4: “They've [women] produced thegreatest writer in the English language ever, George Eliot,and arguably the third greatest, Jane Austen, and certainlythe greatest novel, Middlemarch.”

[24] Guppy, Shusha. “Interviews: Julian Barnes, The Art ofFiction No. 165”. The Paris Review (Winter 2000). Re-trieved 26 May 2012.

[25] Keary, C. F. (1904). “George Gissing,” The Athenaeum,Vol. XVI, p. 82.

[26] Bader, A.L. (1963). “New Looks at Gissing”. The Anti-och Review 23 (3): 392–400.

[27] The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed.Margaret Drabble.Oxford: Oxford University Press,(1985)1996, p.824

[28] Moran, Maureen, (2006), Victorian Literature And Cul-ture p. 145. ISBN 0-8264-8883-8

[29] http://matthewasprey.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/reading-notes-green-hills-of-africa-by-ernest-hemingway/

[30] Hemingway, Ernest (1935). Green Hills of Africa. NewYork: Scribners. p. 22.

[31] Holton, Milne. Cylinder of Fiction. - The Fiction andJournalistic Writing of Stephen Crane. Baton Rouge:Louisiana State UP, 1972. 37.

[32] Rogers, Samuel (1953). Balzac & The Novel. New York:Octagon Books. LCCN 75-76005.

[33] Stowe, WilliamW (983). Balzac, James, and the RealisticNovel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-06567-5.

[34] C. P. Snow (1968). The Realists: Portraits of Eight Novel-ists. Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-24438-9.

[35] Becker, Sabine (2003). Bürgerlicher Realismus; Liter-atur und Kultur im bürgerlichen Zeitalter 1848-1900 (inGerman). Tübingen: Francke.; McInnes, Edward andPlumpe, Gerhard, ed. (1996). Bürgerlicher Realismusund Gründerzeit 1848-1890 (in German). Munich: CarlHanser.

[36] Brockett and Hildy (2003, 370, 372) and Benedetti (2005,100) and (1999, 14-17).

[37] Harrison (1998, 160).

6 Bibliography

• Baron, Christine and Manfred Engel, ed. (2010).Realism/Anti-Realism in 20th-Century Literature.NL: Rodopi. ISBN 978-90-420-3115-9.

7 External links• Realism in American literature at the LiteraryMovements site

• “Victorian Realism – how real?" on BBC Radio 4’sIn Our Time featuring Philip Davis, A.N. Wilsonand Dinah Birch

6 8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

8 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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