Literary realism facts for kids

Literary realism is a type of storytelling that tries to show life exactly as it is. It avoids made-up or magical things. This style started in the mid-1800s in France and Russia. Realist writers wanted to show everyday life and ordinary experiences.

What is Realism?

Realism in art means showing things truthfully. It avoids fake or fancy styles. It also avoids things that are impossible or supernatural. In painting, realism means showing people, places, and colors accurately. Realist art can sometimes show the difficult or messy parts of life. This includes styles like social realism or kitchen sink realism.

The realist art movement began in France in the 1850s. This was after the 1848 Revolution. Realist painters did not like Romanticism. Romanticism was a popular style that focused on strong emotions and grand ideas.

In literature, realism became popular after 1848. It aimed to show "real life" and everyday activities. It often focused on middle or lower-class people. It did not make things seem more exciting or perfect than they were. Realism suggests that truth can be found by observing the world around us.

Writers of realism often used ideas from science. They tried to be as precise and accurate as scientists. They believed that understanding reality could help them write better stories.

Romanticism, which came before realism, was a reaction against the strict rules of the 1700s. It was also a reaction against the Industrial Revolution. Romanticism focused on emotion and nature.

In turn, 19th-century realism was a reaction against Romanticism. Some people called it "traditional" or "bourgeois realism." However, not all writers of the Victorian era wrote in a realist style. Later, modernism reacted against the strict rules of Victorian realism. Modernist writers, starting around 1900, often criticized the middle-class way of life from the 19th century.

Types of Literary Realism

Social Realism

Social realism is an art movement that shows the daily lives of working-class and poor people. It often criticizes the social systems that keep these conditions in place. Its artistic styles can differ, but it always uses a descriptive or critical realist approach.

Kitchen sink realism is a British style from the late 1950s and early 1960s. It appeared in plays, art, novels, films, and TV shows. It used a social realist style. Its main characters were often "angry young men." It showed the home lives of working-class Britons in small, rented homes. It explored social problems and political issues.

These films, plays, and novels are often set in poor industrial areas in Northern England. They use the local accents and slang. The play Look Back in Anger (1956) is seen as the start of this style. Its love story happens in a small, one-room apartment. This style continues today in TV shows like Coronation Street and EastEnders.

Socialist Realism

Socialist realism was the official art style in the Soviet Union. It was made official by Joseph Stalin in 1934. Later, other Communist parties around the world adopted it. This style said that good art should show and praise the struggle of the working class. It aimed to show how society was moving towards socialism.

The rules for socialist realism were very strict. They said that art must show reality truthfully and historically. But it also had to help educate workers about socialism. After Stalin died, writers slowly started to push these limits. But the style was so deeply rooted that even writers who disagreed with the government still followed its basic rules.

Some critics say that the definition of socialist realism was confusing. They found it hard to combine showing reality "as it was" with showing it "as it should be" for socialism.

Naturalism

Naturalism was a literary movement from the 1880s to the 1930s. It used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment strongly shaped human character. It tried to show believable everyday reality. This was different from movements like Romanticism, which used a lot of symbols or supernatural ideas.

Naturalism grew out of literary realism. It was influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. While realism just describes things as they are, naturalism also tried to find the "scientific" reasons behind people's actions. These reasons included their environment or their family background. Naturalistic works often focused on the darker parts of life. This included poverty, racism, violence, and disease. Because of this, naturalistic writers were often criticized for focusing too much on human problems.

Verismo

Verismo is an Italian literary movement. The word vero means 'true' or 'real' in Italian. It aimed to describe reality. Its main writers were Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana.

The characters in Verismo stories were often poor, struggling, and not well-educated. They faced challenges from the changes happening in society in the late 1800s. They often found it hard to adapt to progress. Sometimes, the characters were middle-class people.

Verismo was inspired by French Naturalism. But it was different in one key way. Naturalist writers were more hopeful. They believed literature could change society. They also felt writers had a moral duty. So, their works often included the author's opinions. This is not true for Verismo. Verismo writers like Giovanni Verga believed that literature could not change reality. So, they did not comment on their characters. They tried to be objective and not interfere with the story.

A common feature of Verismo is the use of language that matches the characters' social class and education. For example, if characters were farmers, they would use simple, everyday language. Middle-class characters would speak in a more refined way. The stories often included words from local Italian dialects.

Realism in Novels

Australia

In the early 1800s, Australia wanted to create its own culture, separate from England. Australian realism often featured the Australian Outback, called "the bush." It showed its harsh beauty. It also showed British settlers, Indigenous Australians, and farmers. Some of these characters became almost mythical. Early Australian realism often rejected a "romantic identity" of the country.

Much of the earliest writing in Australia was journals and records of expeditions. But literary styles still influenced these writings. Often, romanticism and realism existed together in early Australian literature. An example is Joseph Furphy's Such Is Life (1897). It tells the story of rural people in southern New South Wales and Victoria in the 1880s. Catherine Helen Spence's Clara Morison (1854) described a Scottish woman moving to Adelaide.

As the working-class community in Sydney grew, the focus shifted from the bush to the city. Books like Christina Stead's Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) and Ruth Park's The Harp in the South (1948) showed the tough reality of working-class Sydney. Patrick White's novels Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957) were very successful. White won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973.

United Kingdom

Ian Watt argued that the novel began in the early 1700s. He said its newness was its "formal realism." This meant the novel was a "full and authentic report of human experience." He gave examples like Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. Watt believed that the novel's focus on realistic relationships between ordinary people matched the growth of philosophical realism and middle-class values.

Later in the 19th century, George Eliot's (1819–1880) Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72) is a great example of realism. Many novelists call it the greatest novel in English. Through different characters, readers learn about important issues of the time. These included the Reform Bill of 1832, the start of railways, and medical science. Middlemarch also shows how a settled community reacted to unwelcome social, political, and technological changes.

Other novelists, like Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) and George Moore (1852–1933), copied French realists. Bennett's most famous works are the Clayhanger trilogy (1910–18) and The Old Wives' Tale (1908). These books are based on his life in the industrial area of Staffordshire, England. George Moore, known for Esther Waters (1894), was also influenced by the naturalism of Zola.

United States

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was the first American writer to bring a realist style to U.S. literature. His stories about middle and upper-class life in the 1880s and 1890s are highly respected. His most popular novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), shows a man who loses his wealth due to his own mistakes. Other early American realists include Mark Twain and Stephen Crane.

Twain's style used strong, realistic, everyday American speech. This gave American writers a new appreciation for their own voice. Twain was the first major author from the country's interior. He captured its unique, funny slang and rebellious spirit. For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was more than just a writing technique. It was a way to speak the truth and break old rules.

Crane was mainly a journalist who also wrote stories, poems, and plays. He saw life at its rawest, in poor areas and on battlefields. His powerful Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, was very popular in 1895. But he died at 28, having neglected his health. He is still seen as a champion of the common person and a realist. Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is an early American naturalistic novel.

Later American realists include John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Henry James.

Europe

Benito Pérez Galdós, a Spanish writer

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is a key figure of 19th-century realism in fiction. He used specific details and recurring characters. His La Comédie humaine is a huge collection of nearly 100 novels. It was a very ambitious plan to write a complete history of his countrymen's lives. Realism is also important in the works of Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824–1895).

Many novels from this time, including Balzac's, were published in newspapers as series. The popular realist "roman feuilleton" often showed the hidden side of city life. This included crime, police spies, and criminal slang. Similar ideas appeared in plays called melodramas.

Gustave Flaubert's (1821–1880) famous novels Madame Bovary (1857) and Sentimental Education (1869) are high points of French realism. Madame Bovary shows the sad results of romantic ideas on a country doctor's wife. Flaubert also wrote other works in different styles, showing his own romantic side.

In German literature, 19th-century realism was called "Poetic Realism" or "Bourgeois Realism." Important writers included Theodor Fontane and Gottfried Keller.

In Italian literature, the realism genre focused on describing the social and economic conditions of people. Key figures of Italian Verismo include Giovanni Verga and Grazia Deledda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926.

Later realist writers included Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Benito Pérez Galdós, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, and Émile Zola. Zola's naturalism is often seen as a branch of realism.

Realism in Theatre

Theatrical realism was a movement in 19th-century theatre (1870–1960). It created new ways of writing and performing plays to make them feel more like real life. It shared many ideas with naturalism. Both focused on everyday drama, ordinary speech, and simple settings. Realism and naturalism mainly differ in how much choice characters have. Naturalism believes outside forces control characters, while realism believes individuals can choose.

Russia's first professional playwright, Aleksey Pisemsky, and writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy began a tradition of psychological realism in Russia. This led to the creation of the Moscow Art Theatre by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Their productions of Anton Chekhov's plays influenced other writers. Stanislavski developed his famous "system" for actor training, which is good for psychological realism.

19th-century realism is closely linked to the development of modern drama. This is often said to have begun in the early 1870s with the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen's realistic plays in prose have been very influential.

In opera, verismo refers to an Italian tradition after the Romantic period. It tried to include the naturalism of Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen. It showed realistic – sometimes harsh or violent – scenes of everyday life, especially among the lower classes.

In France, besides melodramas, popular and middle-class theatre in the mid-1800s turned to realism. This was seen in the "well-made" plays of Eugène Marin Labiche and the moral dramas of Émile Augier.

Criticism

Some critics say that showing reality is not always truly realistic. They call it "imaginary" or "projected." This idea comes from the thought that we don't always understand what is real correctly. When we try to show reality, we use our memories and experiences. But remembered reality might not always be the truth. Instead, we often get a changed version that is only partly related to what is truly out there. Realism is criticized for not dealing with this problem.

Other critics say that realism defines itself by reacting against other literary styles. These include Romanticism and Gothic stories, which focus on exotic or emotional tales. Some scholars say this leads to a problem. Realism either tries to show a provable, objective truth, or it shows only a partial, subjective truth, which means no truth at all.

There are also critics who say realism doesn't have a clear definition. They argue that there is no "pure" form of realism. They also say it's almost impossible to find literature that isn't realist to some extent. When you look for pure realism, it seems to disappear. However, some argue that this "looseness" makes the term useful in everyday talk and literary discussions. Others dismiss realism as too simple. They say it's just like reporting, not art, and based on simple ideas about reality.

See also

• Chanson réaliste (realist song), a music style influenced by the realist literary movement in France
• Verismo, applying realism ideas to Italian opera.