Literary realism is a movement and genre of literature that attempts to represent mundane and ordinary subject-matter in a faithful and straightforward way, avoiding grandiose or exotic subject matters, exaggerated portrayals, and speculative elements such as supernatural events and alternative worlds. It encompasses both fiction (realistic fiction) and nonfiction writing. Literary realism is a subset of the broader realist art movement that began with mid-nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal) and Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin). It attempts to represent familiar things, including everyday activities and experiences, as they truly are.
Background
Broadly defined as "the representation of reality", realism in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, as well as implausible, exotic and supernatural elements. Realism has been prevalent in the arts at many periods, and is in large part a matter of technique and training, and the avoidance of stylization. In the visual arts, illusionistic realism is the accurate depiction of lifeforms, perspective, and the details of light and colour. Realist works of art may emphasize the ugly or sordid, such as works of social realism, 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. The realism art movement in painting began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution. The realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century.
Realism as a movement in literature was a post-1848 phenomenon, according to its first theorist Jules-Français Champfleury. It aims to reproduce "objective reality", and focuses on showing every day, quotidian activities and life, primarily among the middle- or lower-class society, without romantic idealization or dramatization. It may be regarded as the general attempt to depict subjects as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation and "in accordance with secular, empirical rules." As such, the approach inherently implies a belief that such reality is ontologically independent of man's conceptual schemes, linguistic practices and beliefs, and thus can be known (or knowable) to the artist, who can in turn represent this 'reality' faithfully. As literary critic Ian Watt states in The Rise of the Novel, modern realism "begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses" and as such "it has its origins in Descartes and Locke, and received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century."
In the Introduction to The Human Comedy (1842) Balzac "claims that poetic creation and scientific creation are closely related activities, manifesting the tendency of realists towards taking over scientific methods". The artists of realism used the achievements of contemporary science, the strictness and precision of the scientific method, in order to understand reality. The positivist spirit in science presupposes feeling contempt towards metaphysics, the cult of the fact, experiment and proof, confidence in science and the progress that it brings, as well as striving to give a scientific form to studying social and moral phenomena."
In the late 18th century Romanticism was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the previous Age of Reason and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature found in the dominant philosophy of the 18th century, as well as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and the natural sciences.
19th-century realism was in its turn a reaction to Romanticism, and for this reason it is also commonly derogatorily referred to as traditional or "bourgeois realism". However, not all writers of Victorian literature produced works of realism. The rigidities, conventions, and other limitations of Victorian realism prompted in their turn the revolt of modernism. Starting around 1900, the driving motive of modernist literature was the criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and world view, which was countered with an antirationalist, antirealist and antibourgeois program.
Sub-genres of literary realism
Social realism is an international art movement that includes the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and filmmakers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these conditions. While the movement's artistic styles vary from nation to nation, it almost always uses a form of descriptive or critical realism.
Kitchen sink realism (or kitchen sink drama) is a term coined to describe a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, which used a style of social realism. Its protagonists usually could be described as angry young men, and it often depicted the domestic situations of working-class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues and political controversies.
The films, plays and novels employing this style are set frequently in poorer industrial areas in the North of England, and use the rough-hewn speaking accents and slang heard in those regions. The film It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a precursor of the genre, and the John Osborne play Look Back in Anger (1956) is thought of as the first of the genre. The gritty love-triangle of Look Back in Anger, for example, takes place in a cramped, one-room flat in the English Midlands. The conventions of the genre have continued into the 2000s, finding expression in such television shows as Coronation Street and EastEnders.
In art, "Kitchen Sink School" was a term used by critic David Sylvester to describe painters who depicted social realist–type scenes of domestic life.
Socialist realism is the official Soviet art form that was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934 and was later adopted by allied Communist parties worldwide. This form of realism held that successful art depicts and glorifies the proletariat's struggle toward socialist progress. The Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934 stated that socialist realism
The strict adherence to the above tenets, however, began to crumble after the death of Stalin when writers started expanding the limits of what is possible. However, the changes were gradual since the social realism tradition was so ingrained into the psyche of the Soviet literati that even dissidents followed the habits of this type of composition, rarely straying from its formal and ideological mold. The Soviet socialist realism did not exactly emerge on the very day it was promulgated in the Soviet Union in 1932 by way of a decree that abolished independent writers' organizations. This movement had existed for at least fifteen years and was first seen during the Bolshevik Revolution. The 1934 declaration only formalized its canonical formulation through the speeches of the Andrei Zhdanov, the representative of the Party's Central Committee.
The official definition of socialist realism has been criticized for its conflicting framework. While the concept itself is simple, discerning scholars struggle in reconciling its elements. According to Peter Kenez, "it was impossible to reconcile the teleological requirement with realistic presentation," further stressing that "the world could either be depicted as it was or as it should be according to theory, but the two are obviously not the same."
Naturalism
Naturalism was a literary movement or tendency from the 1880s to 1930s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was a mainly unorganized literary movement that sought to depict believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic or even supernatural treatment.
Naturalism was an outgrowth of literary realism, influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (e.g., the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works often include supposed sordid subject matter, for example, Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart's treatment of sexuality, as well as pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works tend to focus on the darker aspects of life, including poverty, racism, violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for focusing too much on human vice and misery.
Verismo
Verismo (from Italian vero, meaning 'true, real') was an Italian literary movement which aimed to describe reality. Its main representatives were Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, regarded as the authors of a "manifesto" of the genre. Among other exponents were Matilde Serao and 1926 Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda (see main article for more).
Protagonists of the genre were often (yet not always) poor, disadvantaged and scarcely educated people, who struggled against adversities. They often came from popular environments and their lifestyle was challenged by the progress that society was experiencing in the late 19th century; such characters usually could not adapt themselves to that progress. Other times, the protagonists were Bourgeois. Verismo was inspired by French Naturalism, but differed from it in a significant way: in fact, Naturalist authors were more optimistic and believed that literature could have an influence on society and its development, therefore conceived the writer's role as charged with moral responsibilities and this is reflected in their works, which usually present comments by the authors and digressions where they express their opinion about the way their characters act. This does not happen in Verismo: in fact, Verist authors such as Giovanni Verga usually believe that reality cannot be changed through literature, so they do not make any comment on their characters and tend to distance themselves from the narration, by adopting an objective, non-intrusive perspective (yet the authors somehow manage to let the readers understand their point of view). A typical feature of Verismo is the usage of a language which coincides with the characters' social condition and their level of education: therefore, if the protagonists of the story are e.g., peasants, they will use a popular, lowbrow language; middle class characters will speak in a higher, more raffinate way. The works often present terms deriving from vernaculars and regional Italian, especially Sicilian.
Historical realism
Historical realism is a writing style or sub-genre of realistic fiction centered around historical events and time periods. In historical realism, the structure and context of a text is usually solely derived from a real historical event or time period. As a consequence of this, many texts that fall under this category are philosophical by nature.
Realism in the novel
Australia
In the early nineteenth century, there was growing impetus to establish an Australian culture that was separate from its English Colonial beginnings. Common artistic motifs and characters that were represented in Australian realism were the Australian Outback, known simply as "the bush", in its harsh and volatile beauty, the British settlers, the Indigenous Australian, the squatter and the digger—although some of these bordered into a more mythic territory in much of Australia's art scene. A significant portion of Australia's early realism was a rejection of, according to what the Sydney Bulletin called in 1881 a "romantic identity" of the country.