19th Century Literary Pieces During

Cultural Period Towards English

Literature
Michelle A. Diaz
This paper is focused on English-language literature
rather than the literature of England, so that it
includes writers from Scotland, Wales, the Crown
dependencies, and the whole of Ireland, as well as
literature in English from countries of the former
British Empire, including the United States.
However, until the early 19th century, it only deals
with the literature of the United Kingdom, the
Crown dependencies and Ireland. It does not
include literature written in the other languages of
Britain. The English language has developed over
the course of more than 1,400
years.The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian
dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers
in the fifth century, are called Old English. Middle English
began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest
of England. Early Modern English began in the late 15th
century with the introduction of the printing press to
London and the King James Bible as well as the Great
Vowel Shift. Through the influence of the British Empire,
the English language has spread around the world since
the 17th century. Literature of the 19th century refers to
world literature produced during the 19th century. The
range of years is, for the purpose of this article, literature
written from (roughly) 1799 to 1900
. Many of the developments in literature in this period parallel changes
in the visual arts and other aspects of 19th-century culture. Literary
realism is the trend, beginning with mid nineteenth-century French
literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century authors, toward depictions of contemporary life and society as
it was, or is. In the spirit of general "realism," realist authors opted for
depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of
a romanticized or similarly stylize. George Eliot's novel Middlemarch
stands as a great milestone in the realist tradition. It is a primary
example of nineteenth-century realism's role in the naturalization of
the burgeoning capitalist marketplace. William Dean Howells was the
first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to the literature of the
United States
. His stories of 1850s Boston upper-crust life are highly
regarded among scholars of American fiction. His most
popular novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, depicts a man who
falls from materialistic fortune by his own mistakes. Stephen
Crane has also been recognized as illustrating important
aspects of realism to American fiction in the stories Maggie: A
Girl of the Streets and The Open Boat presentation. Honoré
de Balzac is often credited with pioneering a systematic
realism in French literature, through the inclusion of specific
detail and recurring characters. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo
Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert, and Ivan Turgenev are regarded by
many critics as representing the zenith of the realist style with
their unadorned prose and attention to the details of
everyday life
. In German literature, 19th-century realism
developed under the name of "Poetic Realism" or
"Bourgeois Realism," and major figures include
Theodor Fontane, Gustav Freytag, Gottfried Keller,
Wilhelm Raabe, Adalbert Stifter, and Theodor
Storm. Later "realist" writers included Benito Pérez
Galdós, Nikolai Leskov, Guy de Maupassant, Anton
Chekhov, José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, Machado
de Assis, Bolesław Prus and, in a sense, Émile Zola,
whose naturalism is often regarded as an offshoot
of realism.