Literary Realism

11 Key excerpts on "Literary Realism"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Reading the American Novel 1865 - 1914

  • G. R. Thompson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 Of Realism and Reality Definitions and Contexts

  As a literary term, realism normally refers to a theory and practice of fiction in which the artistic goal is to portray “life as it is” – rather than intensified or as it should be – and in simple direct language rather than striving for striking metaphors and indulging in rhetorical flourishes. The elevated subject matter of classic tragedy, or the poetic elements of optative romanticism, or the sentimental aspects of domestic novels and romances, or the hair-raising events of gothic romances were to be downplayed or avoided in favor of the everyday, average, prosaic aspects of life.

  Realism in this sense was especially prominent in France, England, the United States, and Russia from about the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s and 1940s (and beyond). But there are realistic, mimetic elements in works written centuries before: in the Iliad and the Odyssey (c. eighth century bc), in the plays of Sophocles (496–406 BC), in Boccaccio's Decameron tales (1351–1353) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), in the plays of Shakespeare (1564–1616) and other Renaissance dramatists. Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) presents a hybrid form of a romance and novel in which the interplay of worldviews is centrally informed by the mixture of realism with idealized romanticism. Many consider this seventeenth-century work the cornerstone of the modern novel.

  In the English-speaking world, literary historians generally point to the principal eighteenth-century British novelists as anticipating the nineteenth century in the development of modern realism. In American literature, the primary meaning of realism indicates a period: the historical era from about a decade after the American Civil War to a decade or two after World War I.1 But Literary Realism, even when confined to a historical period, is not a single undiversified idea or theoretical program or movement. In both Britain and America, major fictional forms partaking of both realism and romance included the domestic novel , the novel of manners , and the sentimental novel . In America there was an important, predominantly realist, movement toward regionalism , within which broad rubric a form called local color is sometimes distinguished. Both centrally involve a forceful vernacular style (idiomatic spoken language), often in dialect (regional or ethnic idiom). In addition, we can identify, at the minimum, several forms of realist theory and practice in Europe and America: objective realism , compassionate realism , benevolent realism , and sentimental realism . There is also a distinction to be made between intense “social reformist” realism and “quiet” realism. Variations on realism and anti-romance are also in tension with, or in complementary relation to, impressionism and expressionism and most especially naturalism .2

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Realism: Aesthetics, Experiments, Politics

  • Jens Elze(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  It may precisely be due to this confusion or, as has been formulated in more polite terms, to its “exceptional elasticity” that the term “realism” today looks back on an impressive, albeit somewhat doubtful, success story. 20 Historically rooted, as we have seen, above all in the 1850s in France, it has rather unhistorically deployed its impact forward and backward in the sense that, prospectively, it even today still looks as if it were addressing an important—if not the important—aspect or feature of what is widely, and almost always epigonally, identified with, or commonly taken for, “literature,” while at the same time, it is also used retrospectively to— anachronistically but, perhaps, to some extent also appropriately—describe, for example, eighteenth-century or even seventeenth-century prose or is taken as an epithet referring to the “novel” in general, going back to works like Cervantes’s Don Quixote or even Homer’s Odyssey. 21 Considering this, one can say that the term today seems to have split into basically two complementary, if not contradictory, uses: (1) “realism” as a historical term referring to the literature of a certain distinct period, that is to say, (roughly) to the genre of the novel in the second half of the nineteenth century, and (2) “realism” as a typological (or systematic) term referring to a certain mode of re/presenting a text’s contents in a way so as to make the process of transmission as self-denying or unobtrusive or direct or objective or transparent or consumable as possible. 22 In the first case, “realism” is used as a term referring to a specific period in time comparable to other periods such as “classicism,” “romanticism,” “modernism,” “postmodernism,” etc.; in the second, it is used as a term identifying a specific style or mode, a way of expressing things, presupposing some existence of what is being expressed and, more often than not, appearing rather in the adjectival form “realistic” than in its nominal equivalent.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Realisms in Contemporary Culture

  Theories, Politics, and Medial Configurations

  • Dorothee Birke, Stella Butter, Dorothee Birke, Stella Butter(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Realism, Women Writers and the Contemporary British Novel 49 Nick Turner (Manchester) Realism, Women Writers and the Contemporary British Novel The Realist movement endorsed a particular way of looking at art and life as though there was a direct correspondence between the two. […] Realism has little to do with reality. It is, rather, a critical construct […]. 1 These words sum up what realism has become for many scholars and literary critics: something in the past that we should be glad is gone, a kind of literary equivalent of the British Empire, which we have thrown out like some em-barrassing piece of clothing from our literary youth. Except that, thankfully, it has not quite gone away. Reviewing recent pub-lications on the novel, critic and Booker Prize judge Hermione Lee revealed her view of what the business of the novelist should be. “Theorists of the novel haven’t much acknowledged the possibility of reading for story and character, or of thinking of ‘characters’ as ‘an implied person outside the par-ameters of the narrative text’”, states Lee; she then comments that “in all the generalizations about the novel, it’s the places where the critics take on the stuff, the prosaic detail, the thinginess of fiction […] that most speak to the reader”. Lee approves of the fact that, in the books under review, “there is general agreement that one of the novel’s main functions, whatever its shape or style, is to tell the story of vulnerable, ordinary, eccentric or obscure indi-viduals so that we will better understand them”. 2 She is right. For her and for these writers, realism and the liberal humanist subject are at the fore, where once they were derided as outdated and incapable of rendering both the frag-mented postmodern world, and the post-Freudian, often postcolonial, sub-jectivity.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  How to Make Believe

  The Fictional Truths of the Representational Arts

  • J. Alexander Bareis, Lene Nordrum, J. Alexander Bareis, Lene Nordrum(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  The Concept of Literary Realism | 29 indeed have a positive relationship to reality. Moreover, it makes the concept of Literary Realism much less interesting as a critical instrument and it would make it difficult to explain why critics find it illuminating to identify realist elements in works that are clearly not realist or intended to be realist. It would seem, then, that the only account that would yield a fruitful and interesting concept of Literary Realism is the conventionalist account, which nevertheless accepts ‘a positive relationship to reality’ as a criterion for a literary work being realist. The problem for such an account would be to provide an interpretation of the criterion of ‘positive relationship to reality’ without falling back on the notion of ‘truthful/objective representation’. A possible departure for such an interpretation can be found in formula-tions like the following: Realism in literature connotes a way of depicting, describing a situation in a faithful, accu-rate, life-like manner; or richly, abundantly, colourfully; or again mechanically, photo-graphically, imitatively. (Stern 1973, 40) The following passage from Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns seems to illustrate such a narrative procedure: In the slip-house begins the long manipulation which transforms raw porous, pliable clay into the moulded, decorated, and glazed vessel. The large whitewashed place was occu-pied by ungainly machines and receptacles through which the four sorts of clay used in the common ‘body’ – ball clay, China clay, flint clay, and stone clay – were compelled to pass before they became a white putty-like mixture for shaping by human hands. The blunger crushed the clay, the sifter extracted the iron from it by means of a magnet, the press expelled the water, and the pug-mill expelled the air. From the last reluctant mouth slowly emerged a solid stream nearly a foot in diameter, like a huge white snake.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel

  • R. Carnell(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Even within a given period and a given selection of novels, readers have not necessarily agreed about what creates a feeling of reality, nor have subsequent critics agreed upon what seems “realistic” in works produced in earlier eras. Across the centuries, some reviewers and scholars have found 8 THE RISE OF THE BRITISH NOVEL Pamela’s first-person narrative compelling and believably voiced, while others have found implausible Richardson’s attempts at “writing to the moment.” More generally, a feeling of “reality” or “plausibility” has been ascribed by critics sometimes to a third-person and sometimes to a first-person narrator, and sometimes to a free-indirect style that marries the two. In traditional scholarship, realism is sometimes identified with an apparently objective or ironic narrative detachment, some- times with a “stream of consciousness” monologue, and sometimes with a narration perceived as too subjective to be “reliable.” Similarly, the depiction of “realistic” character has been ascribed sometimes to an abundance and sometimes to a scarcity of detail. However, in mid- twentieth-century accounts of narrative realism, realistic character was typically conceived of as both concrete and universal, hence implicitly apolitical, or at least nonpartisan. When considering the connection between “literary” and “political” history, it is useful to remember that the impulse to draw a sharp division between the literary and the political is a twentieth-century phenomenon, one that has affected the way we study both literature and social history. 34 Scholarship on the connection between the literary and the political public spheres, for example, has sometimes drawn on the popular twentieth-century assumption that there once was a “literary” sphere inculcating “affective humanism” which was separate from, although necessary to, a “public” sphere of commercial and political concerns.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Adventures in Realism

  • Matthew Beaumont(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Nowhere is this clearer than in the regular scorn for realism’s crudely “linear” narratives, its naively “omniscient” narrators, and – worst crime of all – its facile assumptions of linguistic “transparency,” all of these being qualities that are quite untransparent and unanalyzed in their own meaning but essentially damning in their aim. Found a realist work that doesn’t fit the stereo-type? No matter, the virtues must be to do with its anticipation of mod-ernist experimentation or else its continuing romanticist exploration of subjectivity. Thus it comes about that realism today, poor old realism, has a doubly “understudy” status. It rarely plays a critical part in its own right, instead serving as the simple straw man whose role is only to show up the auth-entic and original literary or critical action occurring elsewhere. And it is under-studied, not much seen as a worthwhile, let alone an exciting topic for teaching and research. There are several ironies in the set-piece devaluation of realism as being without intellectual or aesthetic interest. First, the gesture elides the historical significance of realism (and, for that matter, of other movements to which it is negatively contrasted), instead treating the positive qualities of formal innovation as transhistorically valid and homogeneous. This is to ignore the historical variability of aesthetic criteria, or that of criteria for considering the subversive or stabilizing effects, politically or psychologically, of particular kinds of art; the overlapping or separation of these various kinds of criteria is itself also, of course, a matter of historical variation. It is also to ignore the multiplicity of realisms in realism’s own primary time (as well as before or since). Realism was the focus of an international artistic movement beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The first attested use of the word is in French – réalisme – in 1826; before long it was everywhere.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Literature and Materialisms

  • Frederic Neyrat(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  an artist needs always to make choice about which details to include and which to exclude, as well as how details should be arranged and presented. Even a photograph must always be taken from a particular angle and focused in a specific manner, with some material included and some left out of its frame. The details involved in an apparently simple action, such as a woman crossing her room to open the door after hearing a knock, are theoretically infinite, as are the angles from which the action might be described in a literary text (including the point of view, for instance, of somebody listening from an apartment one story down). (44)

  Barrish’s comment instantiates what I call the classic discourse on Literary Realism. By this, I mean the identification of the paradox that is at play in every realist text: Whereas a realist perspective is supposed to reflect reality, in fact it interprets it and subjectively selects the parts of reality to be stressed. This paradox is explained in every dictionary of literary terms. For example, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms stresses the contradiction between the claim that Literary Realism is “a mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or ‘reflecting’ faithfully an actual way of life” and the necessity of using a “system of conventions” to produce “a lifelike illusion of some ‘real’ world outside the text, by processes of selection, exclusion, description, and manners of addressing the reader.”4

  That said, do not believe that only academics know that a paradox lies at the core of any realist literary attempt – as a novelist, James knew that very well. It is true that, in the essay to which I already referred, James argues that the art of fiction is not only after a “make-believe,” but that its goal is to give “a direct impression of life”5 . But do not presume that James only asks the writer to imitate life, to copy it. In fact, James insists on the necessity of giving a “direct” impression of reality to avert what would be the worst thing to do for a writer, that is to say applying a form a priori onto the things to be described: “the form is to be appreciated after the fact” (50). The call for a “direct impression of life” turns out to be a warning to the writer, and an indication of what first has to be made: A writer needs to get rid of any preexisting form , any model, in order to create a specific form commensurate to the situation to be described

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Cambridge History of the English Novel

  • Robert L. Caserio, Clement Hawes(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  And we owe all this to our ancest – ” “Ancestors who wrote books; thank you.” 4 Writing that seeks to record “real” things – views, principles, the experience of being alive, even of talking in a marketplace – constitutes a unique gateway to the past. Those who practice such writing are, in the terms of Pisistratus’ father, gifted with the potential to endure life. But the conversation enables a reader to ruminate not just on historical archives of personal testimony, but indirectly on Bulwer Lytton’s own book, on nineteenth-century realism-as- charm. The notion of writing’s connection with the real, despite the passage of time, points subtly to the capacity of literary language to create a simulacrum of vitality that feels, truly, like vitality. There has often seemed to be some- thing of enchantment about that. The offer of a simulacrum of life is part of realism’s promise of engagement with the real. That act of making the dead seem alive, however, was also among the most distinctive plots of nineteenth-century romance. Romance figures the uncanny aspirations, the best though seemingly most idealistic aspirations of realism. But for George Eliot the purposes of realism were first and foremost a dedication to the empirical fabric of life. She was not averse to the gothic or to mystery, as The Lifted Veil (1859) reveals. But Eliot’s realism, agnostic and committed to a morality of sympathy, grows primarily from the firm ground of the new science and a faith in reason. Her realism speaks persistently of a conviction that the earth is the only subject that has a chance of being known. Fiction for Eliot is a secular experiment in recording human lives, in witnessing the results of their deeds and thoughts. It is a form of verbal vivisection with a moral purpose, undertaken in order to fortify human connections beyond the page.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Reading Between the Lines

  A Christian Guide to Literature

  • Gene Edward Veith Jr.(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Crossway

    (Publisher)

  It is not possible for an author to simply transcribe the objective world in a purely passive way. The author’s beliefs and assumptions keep intruding themselves, actively shaping perceptions and how they are conveyed. A writer may try to be a mirror, but cannot help also being a lamp. If a writer claims to be a realist, we must ask what that writer considers to be real. The rise of Darwinism in the nineteenth cen tury led to a literary movement known as naturalism. According to this view, only nature and nature’s laws are real. The theory of evolution taught that human beings were nothing more than animals, that human life is determined by physical laws outside of the control of the individual, and that life consists of conflict in which only the fittest will survive. This brand of realism, exemplified by Emile Zola, Stephen Crane, and Jack London, was often brilliant in its vivid descriptions, its lifelike evocations of the natural world, and its penetrating lan guage. The atmosphere of their works is generally bleak and hopeless; the characters are swept up by deterministic forces outside their con trol. Although the naturalistic writers accepted a materialistic world view, their spirits often rebelled against its implications, resulting in works of enraged despair at such an empty universe.

  A related view of reality was that of Karl Marx, who stressed a determinism based not so much on nature but on social forces. This helped inspire another group of writers whom we could call social real ists. At their best, these writers portrayed the dynamics of social life with penetrating insight or exposed social injustice. Sinclair Lewis sav aged small town America in novels such as Babbitt (the story of a busi nessman’s attempted rebellion against his drab middle class life) and Elmer Gantry (the story of a hypocritical evangelist who is ruined by his affair with a church secretary—notice how life sometimes imitates art). Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a story of the brutal conditions faced by immigrants in the meatpacking plants of Chicago, led to legislation regulating the food industry (although Sinclair’s purpose was to pro mote socialist political reform).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Towards a Semiotics of Ideology

  • Carlos Reis(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Chapter IV Narrative and realist representation 1. Marxism and realism 1.1. To speak of realist representation, in the present context, does not imply that we will be presenting an exhaustive account of the problematic of Realism, in all its varied and complex facets. It is well known that this is a field of theoretical endeavour full of difficulties and contradictions; the writers themselves speak thus of the former: Between art and reality there is always an abyss with no bridge. On this side, a world with a thousand versions, mild even when the words are daggers, the colours lightning, the cries of despair. On the other side, a presence without rhetoric, of one face only, inflexible and permanent. 1 Therefore, it is not for us to rehearse here the debate on the meanings encompassed by the term Realism, on its polysemy or on the historical variations it has suffered; distinguished authors like René Wellek and J. R Stern, Roger Garaudy and André Gisselbrecht have already done that, the first with profuse historico-literary documentation, 2 the last two locating the problem in the domain of the relationship between Material-ism and artistic Realism. We are interested in another route, perhaps one with some unexplored areas, at least from the perspective we will be taking here: we are referring to the concept of Realism as an artistic category and, in a second phase, to its connections with narrative. When Pierre Macherey states that the production of an impression of reality, which gives the literary work its necessity, belongs to language in general, and the particular use that the writer makes of it cannot be distinguished, 3 his words suggest an attempt to expand realist representa-tion (or the possibility of it) beyond an ideological system and the limits of a specific historical period.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  No longer available |Learn more

  Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism

  • Jutta Ernst, Sabina Matter-Seibel, Klaus H. Schmidt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Universitätsverlag Winter

    (Publisher)

  The proliferation of such compendiums epitomizes the increasing importance of realism and naturalism as literary tradi-tions, not only in the academic marketplace but also in the global class-4 For a seminal study on authenticity and fakery in U.S. realism and early modernism, see Balkun, The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture (2006). For a recent conference, orga-nized by Dustin Breitenwischer and Tobias Keiling at the University of Freiburg, see “Truth or Post-Truth? Reality, Factivity, and Current Perspec-tives in Pragmatism and Hermeneutics” (January 12–13, 2018). 5 One of the by-products of this renaissance was the rediscovery of forgotten authors and their texts—John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing (1960/2007) being a prime example. 6 For the differentiation between “storytelling” and “affective” neorealists and their roles as representatives of competing tendencies within neorealism, see Lee Konstantinou, “Neorealist Fiction” (2018). Introduction ix room, 7 where realist and naturalist texts have long been used to teach the social tensions and ideological conflicts underlying the formation of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For much of what is new in recent publications on the subject, we are indebted to interventions from the perspectives of race, 8 class, 9 and gen-der. 10 Equally productive have been readings focusing on money and economics (including critiques of capitalism and discursive regimes of business and finance); 11 globalization (including transnational dynam-ics); 12 nature and the environment (including ecocriticism and food stud-ies); 13 visual culture (including investigations into film and photogra-7 For the role of U.S. realism and naturalism in German university education, see Schmidt, “Teaching American Realism in Germany” (forthcoming).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book