Realism/BA III/ Special English/Literary Criticism/Semester V

                                              (E-content developed by Dr N. A. Jarandikar)

Realism

Realism is the 19^th century movement. It is related to painting, music, theatre, cinema, photography and especially the novel form. It is believed that the movement of realism began with Stendhal (the French writer) and   Alexander Pushkin (the Russian writer). The term was a strong reaction against romanticism. Rise of new middle class, rapid urbanization and industrial revolution were the main reasons for the emergence of realism. Industrial revolution and urbanization brought along with them the social evils like health problems, legal problems, women’s problems, education problems, etc.

Realism is broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality". It is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and supernatural elements. Realism as a movement in literature was based on "objective reality". It focused on showing every day, unattractive activities and life, mainly among the middle or lower class society.

The salient features of realist novel are as follows:

i)             Character is more important than plot.

ii)           Importance is given to a social class, particularly the lower middle class.

iii)          Language is very natural, day – today.

iv)          No place for sensational, dramatic elements.

United Kingdom: The 18^th century English novelists namely, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding paved the way for the realism. Their novels catered the interests of the new middle-class reading public. Later in the 19th-century George Eliot's Middlemarch, which is considered as the greatest novel in the English language, is a work of realism. The novel encompasses the important issues of the day, including the Reform Bill of 1832, the beginnings of the railways, and the state of contemporary medical science. Other novelists, such as Arnold Bennett  and George Moore are the other important English novelists who followed the realist tradition.  

American realism: William Dean Howells  was the first American author who wrote in the realist tradition. The Rise of Silas Lapham is his most popular novel. Other American realists include Samuel Clemens, John Steinbeck, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, and Henry James. Samuel Clemens is better known by his pen name of Mark Twain. Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  is an important realist novel.

Europe: Balzac from France is the most prominent representative of 19th-century realism in fiction. Many of the novels in this period portrayed the hidden side of urban life such as crime, police spies, criminal, slang. Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary (1857) reveals the tragic consequences of one wife and her husband – doctor. The novel represents perhaps the highest stage in the development of French realism.

Later important realist writers included Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, and, in a sense, Émile Zola, whose naturalism is often regarded as an offshoot of realism.

The theatre

Theatrical realism was a general movement in 19th-century theatre from the time period of 1870–1960. It gave importance to a greater fidelity of real life to texts and performances. It focused on everyday middle-class drama, ordinary speech, and dull settings.  With Leo Tolstoy began a tradition of psychological realism in Russia. Another important dramatist of this period was Anton Chekhov. 19th-century realism is closely connected to the development of modern drama. It was mainly influenced by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen.

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