From Romanticism to Realism

“The idea of realism is that it would shine

a light on the real world and not hide
behind some lovely romantic ideal that did
not exist.” Madame Bovary
From Romantic Idealism to Realism

At about the middle of the nineteenth century, the

influence of many social forces caused aesthetic
taste to change from romantic idealism to realism.
 Many writers felt that the romantics-- with their focus
on the spiritual, the abstract, and the ideal--were being
dishonest or misled about life as it really was.
 The realists felt they had an ethical responsibility to
serve: working for a noble social cause.
 They felt that the romantic impulse had veered away
towards escapist literature that presented life as one
wished it to be, but not life as it was.
Why Realism?
 Many realists wished to represent life honestly and
faithfully in the hope that seeing social conditions
accurately would lead to better conditions. They felt
romantics were driven by any acute sense of
responsibility and engagement. No change could be
expected if they kept only idealizing things.
 Many realists asserted that writers should accept
their human limitation, and felt compelled to remain
objective--to depict life as it is, without radically
commenting on it.
Characteristics of Realism
1. Realism focuses on the common, everyday life of average,
ordinary people, here and now. No longer are stories just about
extraordinary individuals.

2. Authors of realistic fiction see themselves as scientists. They

tried to write "scientifically" by inventing realistic characters,
placing those characters in realistic situations, then
imaginatively recording how those characters realistically
responded.
3.Most realists attempt to provide an objective reproduction of
life. They use descriptive language to describe sights and
sounds, creating a texture that suggests meaning, but they
avoid explaining the meaning or interpreting the significance of
a scene.
4. They often use dialect to depict real, ordinary speech.
They take great pain to reflect the way a character from a
certain region would truly speak.
5. The Realists are often impelled by the urge for social reform.
They attempt to expose situations in order to change them.
6. The Realists focus on people in social situations that often
require compromise.
They develop characters that are antiheroes or tragic heroes-

7. While the realists emphasize external, material reality, they also

recognize the reality complex of human psychology.
 Their characters are complicated personalities, whose
individual responses to situations are influenced by many
external and internal factors.
REALISM

The dominant paradigm in novel writing during

the second half of the nineteenth century was
no longer the romantic idealism of the earlier
part of the century. What took hold among the
great novelists in Europe and America was a
new approach to character and subject matter,
a school of thought which later came to be
known as “Realism”.
 Naturalism
Naturalism sought to go further and be more
explanatory than realism by identifying the
underlying causes for a person’s actions or beliefs.
The thinking was that certain factors, such as
heredity and socio-economic conditions, were
unavoidable determinants in one’s life. A poor
immigrant could not escape their life of poverty
because their preconditions were the only formative
aspects in his or her existence that mattered.
Naturalism almost entirely dispensed with the
notion of free will, or at least a free will capable of
enacting real change in life’s circumstances.
 Psychological Realism
The novels that grow out of psychological realism are
considered to be character-driven and place special emphasis
on the interior life of the protagonist or other point-of-view
characters. In these novels, the actual plot is not only
secondary, but arises from the motives, fears, and reactions of
characters to the dilemmas that confront them. As a modern
movement, psychological realism coincided with the
emergence of psychology as a formal study and, although
there is speculation about the relationship between the
movements, penetrating analyses of conscious and
unconscious motivations are evident in the works of
Dostoevsky, Wharton, and James.(See also “the stream of
consciousness”, “interior monologue” or “soliloquy”
narrative modes, with reference to Joyce, Faulkner and
Wolf.)