Re: What Was The Key Characteristic In The Realist Literary Movement
Frantz Kanter
Romanticism is a literary movement that peaked in England in the 19th century. It places value on the experiences of the individual, the expression of profound emotion and a communion with nature. Pioneers of Romanticism include William Wordsworth, John Keats and Lord Byron.
Realism in British literature is particularly notable in the Victorian era (1837-1901). Charles Dickens was a major proponent of realism, as many of his stories depicted the lives of working-class people in Victorian England. In many of his stories, such as Great Expectations (1861) and Oliver Twist (1837), he explores how the working class navigate surviving in a hostile political and social environment where living and working conditions were often abysmal.
An example of magical realism is Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison. The novel is the tale of a formerly enslaved family living in Cincinnati after the American Civil War (1861-1865), haunted by a malevolent ghost. The combination of the historically accurate background of a formerly enslaved family combined with the fantasy element of ghosts is what makes this novel a great example of magical realism.
Alexander Fadeyev's The Young Guard (1946) is an example of socialist realism. It tells the story of an anti-German organisation called the Young Guard as it carries out operations in Ukraine. Fadeyev had to rewrite the novel to better highlight the role of the strong Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was strongly advised to do this and the edited version was published in 1951.
An example of psychological realism is the novel A Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James. The protagonist, Isabel, has inherited vast wealth. She is a woman who does not conform to societal norms, and the novel details her thoughts on the experiences she has in life, such as the possibility of her marrying and who she will choose to marry.
A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens is a well-known example of social realism. The Cratchit family features in the novel, and Dickens shows their struggle for survival as a poor working-class family. Protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge is an example of a man who has the wealth to live in better conditions than the Cratchit family but chooses to leave them to their fate. Until the end, that is...
A famous example of kitchen sink realism is Love on the Dole: a Tale of Two Cities (1933) by Walter Greenwood. This novel details the experience of the working-class Hardcastle family living in the north of England in 1930s. The Hardcastle family deal with working-class poverty as a result of mass unemployment in the North.
The Great Depression: The Great Depression was a period of economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. It was mainly caused by the stock market crash in October 1929 in America. It lead to hunger, homelessness and despair for millions of people throughout America and across countries that relied on America for financial assistance, such as Germany, which relied on America for loans. Many millions of people lost their homes and lost their jobs.
A well-known example of contemporary realism literature is The Fault in Our Stars (2012) by John Green. The novel features protagonists Hazel and Augustus who are both terminally ill teenagers. The novel details their experiences dealing with this, and their experiences with love.
An example of psychological realism is Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It focuses on protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov, who is a Russian student who plans to murder a pawnbroker who he believes to be unethical.
Realism in literature is a genre of literature that presents ordinary day-to-day experiences as they occur in reality. This often focuses on middle and lower class members of society, and places familiar to many people.
Realism focused on truthful storytelling rather than symbolic and the idealised portrayals featured in romanticism. Its focus on the everyday meant these stories were more accessible to the average person, who could relate to them.
Realism is a widely used term in the arts. In literature, it came into being as a response to Romanticism. While Romanticism focused on the inner, spiritual side of human nature, and was skewed toward the exceptional and Sublime, Realism focused on the mundane, the everyday. Realism focussed on the ideology of objective reality and revolted against exaggerated emotionalism of Romanticism. It was more "democratic" in orientation, interested in the life of the majority, not the elite. As an artistic strategy, it was an attempt to focus literature on the objective, the concrete; the physical and social milieu was depicted in painstaking detail to convey the ethos of the society. Characters were portrayed in their social setting, which shaped their actions and their choices. Realism is often referred to as an attempt to portray things "as they are," but in fact, it was itself another artistic strategy, employing verisimilitude for artistic ends.
In the visual arts it refers to a style of depiction that attempts to portray subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation. The term is also used to describe works of art which, in revealing a truth, may emphasize the ugly or sordid. Realist artists focused on that side of "reality" which had often been excluded in Romantic art, the unflattering truth of the underside of elite culture.
Realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. This style focuses particularly on the representation of middle-class life and is a reaction against Romanticism. According to William Harmon and Hugh Holman, "Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence" (A Handbook to Literature 428).
In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century, during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and exploration of American lives in various contexts.
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