Realism.
Refers to a literary movement influential in Europe, England, and America, originating about 1830 and increasingly powerful in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Major realists include Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert in France; Turgenev and Tolstoy in Russia; George Eliot and Trollope in England; Howells and James in America. Howells was the primary advocate of realism in America. He called realism "nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material." For Howells as for other realists, realism was opposed to the forced plot conventions and idealized characterizations of romance. Realism can be characterized as a documentary art. Some common features of American realism include: ordinary characters who, while individuals, are representative of a certain class or type; identifiable contemporary setting; dialogue that represents how people of various classes and places really talk; minimizing of authorial intrusion and comment; an ethical imperative to show life the way it is. Wharton and especially James bring to realism deeper concern with the inner psychology of characters (see Norton 2: 6-12). |
