Literary realism

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Literary realism begins with a simple and radical demand: show the world as it actually is. Not the world of knights and supernatural forces, not the world of exotic romance or aristocratic idealism, but the cramped rented flat in the English Midlands where a love triangle plays out, the slum child whose drunken parents fail her at every turn, the provincial doctor's wife slowly destroyed by the gap between her romantic fantasies and her ordinary life. The movement that made these stories central to literature was born in the middle of the nineteenth century, first in France and Russia, and it would reshape storytelling across every continent and language.

  What drove writers to abandon the elevated and the beautiful in favor of the sordid and the everyday? Why did some nations codify realism into official state doctrine, while others used it as a vehicle for satire, rebellion, or raw personal confession? And when critics say that depicting reality is not itself realistic, what exactly do they mean? These are the questions at the heart of literary realism, a movement that refuses to be pinned down even as it insists on the facts in front of you.

• 2. Roots in Reaction

  ›

  Jules-Francois Champfleury, the movement's first theorist, placed literary realism as a post-1848 phenomenon, directly tying its birth to the political upheavals sweeping France. The realist painters had already declared their independence just years earlier, rejecting the Romanticism that had dominated French art since the late eighteenth century. Writers followed the same logic: Romanticism had been a revolt against aristocratic norms and scientific rationalism, and now realism became a revolt against Romanticism itself.

  Honore de Balzac pointed the way in the Introduction to The Human Comedy in 1842, arguing that poetic creation and scientific creation were closely related activities. The positivist spirit, with its cult of fact, experiment, and proof, became a governing principle for realist writers. Ian Watt, writing in The Rise of the Novel, traced this philosophical grounding even further back, arguing that modern realism begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses, with origins in Descartes and Locke, and its first full formulation in Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century.

  The result was a literature that aimed to reproduce objective reality, focused on everyday, quotidian activities among the middle and lower classes, stripped of romantic idealization. Nineteenth-century realism was, for this reason, sometimes dismissed by its critics as bourgeois realism, a label meant as a slur. The very rigidities and conventions of Victorian realism would eventually prompt the next revolt: the modernism that took shape around 1900, with its antirationalist and antibourgeois program.

• 3. The Shape of Naturalism

  ›

  Charles Darwin's theory of evolution gave literary realism one of its most consequential offshoots. Naturalism, a movement or tendency running from the 1880s through the 1930s, used detailed realism to argue that social conditions, heredity, and environment held inescapable force over human character. Where realism sought only to describe subjects as they are, naturalism went further, attempting to determine scientifically the underlying forces shaping behavior.

  Emile Zola's frank treatment of sexuality became emblematic of what naturalists were willing to portray: poverty, racism, violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, and filth. Naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for focusing too much on human vice and misery. In the United States, Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, published in 1893, traced the harrowing arc of a poor, sensitive young girl whose alcoholic, uneducated parents fail her entirely. She is seduced, deserted, rejected by her self-righteous mother, driven to prostitution, and dies. Crane's objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, is precisely what marks Maggie as a naturalist work rather than a moral fable.

  The Italian variant, Verismo, diverged from French naturalism on a key point of philosophy. Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, regarded as the authors of a manifesto of the genre, believed that reality could not be changed through literature. They made no comment on their characters and distanced themselves from the narration entirely. French naturalists, by contrast, were more optimistic, believing that literature could influence society, and their works show it through authorial digressions and moral commentary. Grazia Deledda, another Verist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926.

• 4. Realism Under the State

  ›

  Joseph Stalin institutionalized socialist realism as the official Soviet art form in 1934, and allied Communist parties worldwide adopted it. The Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers that year defined it as the basic method of Soviet literature, demanding truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development, always linked to the ideological education of workers in the spirit of socialism.

  The movement had not, in fact, begun with that declaration. A decree in 1932 had abolished independent writers' organizations, but the tradition reached back at least fifteen years to the Bolshevik Revolution. The 1934 declaration merely formalized a canonical formulation through the speeches of Andrei Zhdanov, the representative of the Party's Central Committee. What the declaration made rigid, however, was the internal contradiction that scholars later identified: Peter Kenez observed that it was impossible to reconcile the teleological requirement with realistic presentation, since the world could either be depicted as it was or as it should be according to theory, but not both simultaneously.

  After Stalin's death, the strict adherence to these tenets began to crumble. Writers started expanding what was possible. Yet the changes were gradual, because the socialist realism tradition had been so deeply absorbed by the Soviet literary world that even dissidents rarely strayed far from its formal and ideological mold.

• 5. National Voices

  ›

  William Dean Howells, born in 1837, was the first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to United States literature. His stories of middle and upper class life in the 1880s and 1890s are highly regarded among scholars of American fiction. His most popular novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, published in 1885, depicts a man who falls from materialistic fortune through his own mistakes, the irony built into the very title.

  Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens in 1835, approached realism from a different angle entirely: the vigorous, colloquial speech of the American interior. He was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, capturing its distinctive humorous slang and iconoclasm. For Twain and other writers of the late nineteenth century, realism was not merely a literary technique; it was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions.

  In Australia, the Sydney Bulletin declared in 1881 against what it called a romantic identity for the country, and the realist impulse took hold around the Australian Outback, the British settler, the Indigenous Australian, the squatter, and the digger. Joseph Furphy's Such Is Life, published in 1897, offered a fictional account of rural life in southern New South Wales and Victoria during the 1880s. Much later, Helen Garner's Monkey Grip in 1977 shifted the focus to inner-city Melbourne, following a single mother through a succession of share-houses and an obsessive relationship with a drug addict. Garner's novel helped spawn a strain known as dirty realism, which examined the nihilistic lives of lower-income young Australians. That strain was eventually grouped under a genre coined in 1995 as grunge lit.

• 6. Theatre and Psychological Depth

  ›

  Theatrical realism developed as a general movement from roughly 1870 through 1960, building dramatic conventions aimed at bringing greater fidelity to real life in performance. Norway's Henrik Ibsen is usually cited as the starting point: his realistic prose drama is described as having begun in the early 1870s and having been enormously influential ever since.

  Russia's first professional playwright, Aleksey Pisemsky, along with novelists Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, whose play The Power of Darkness dates to 1886, established a tradition of psychological realism that culminated in the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Their productions of Anton Chekhov's plays then influenced Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov. Stanislavski went further still, developing his system, a form of actor training specifically suited to psychological realism.

  The British stage found its own variant much later. Kitchen sink drama, a term that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s, depicted working-class Britons in cramped rented accommodation, spending their off-hours in grimy pubs. The film It Always Rains on Sunday from 1947 is recognized as a precursor of the genre. John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 is considered the first full example, its gritty love triangle unfolding in a one-room flat in the English Midlands. The conventions of that genre proved durable enough to persist into the 2000s in television series such as Coronation Street and EastEnders.

• 7. The Case Against Realism

  ›

  Critics of realism have long argued that depicting reality is not itself realistic. The challenge is rooted in the limits of perception: remembered or experienced reality does not always correspond to the truth. We obtain a distorted version of what is actually out there. Realism, critics say, fails to address this problem, and that failure amounts to concealing the constructed nature of the reality it claims to represent.

  Catherine Gallagher argued that realistic fiction invariably undermines in practice the ideology it purports to exemplify. If appearances were self-sufficient, there would probably be no need for novels at all. American literary naturalism illustrated this contradiction vividly: its depictions of agricultural machines shredding entangled human bodies without compunction used those machines as a metaphor, and the metaphor made the narratives feel more like myth than reality, the very opposite of what the movement intended.

  Others fault realism for defining itself purely as a reaction to the excesses of Romanticism and the Gothic. Some scholars have called this an impulse to contradict that leads, in the end, to representing either verifiable objective truth or merely partial, subjective truth. A further line of criticism notes the absence of any fixed definition: there may be no pure form of realism, and it is nearly impossible to find literature that is not realist to at least some extent. J.P. Stern countered that this looseness makes the term indispensable rather than meaningless, arguing that its very untidiness keeps it useful in common and literary discourse alike. Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary in 1857 is held as one of the highest points of French realism, also wrote the fantastic Temptation of Saint Anthony and the baroque Salammbô, demonstrating how thoroughly a single writer could move between the two worlds realism claimed to oppose.