Realism

Realism 1830 - 1900 

• depicts ordinary life 

• "often described as the movement that tries to truthfully describe “reality” through language" according to Mario Klarer's book An Introduction to Literary Studies. 

"In literature, the novelist Honoré de Balzac was the chief precursor of realism, given his attempt to create a detailed, encyclopaedic portrait of the whole range of French society in his La Comédie humaine"  as referred in "The Novel" in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary published in 1857 became "the principal masterpiece of realism and the work that established the movement on the European scene" as cited in "The Novel" in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Among the most famous representatives of literary realism were e.g. Charles Dickens and George Eliot in England, Mark Twain and Henry James in the US, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Russia, Thomas Mann in Germany.

Sources:

“The Novel.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 23 March. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/art/realism-art/The-novel.

Klarer, Mario. An Introdution to Literary Studies. Second Edition, Routledge, 2004. 

Created by Sabina Sliwinska