essay on realism in literature

Definition of Realism

Common examples of themes in realism, examples of novels in literary realism, famous authors’ perspectives regarding literary realism, difference between realism and naturalism, history of realism in the us, history of realism in the uk, six types of realism,  difference between romanticism and realism, difference between realism and impressionism, difference between nominalism and realism, examples of realism in literature, example 1: east of eden by john steinbeck.

There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.

Example 2: A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen

Nora: And then I found other ways of making money. Last winter I was lucky enough to get a lot of copying to do. I locked myself in and sat writing every evening till late in the night . Ah, I was tired so often, dead tired. But still it was wonderful fun, sitting and working like that, earning money. It was almost like being a man.

Example 3: The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin

She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

Example 4: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave , and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece–all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round– more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would civilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer lit out.

Example 5: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

That was two months ago. Then he wanted to come – to the house. He wanted to stay there. He said al of us – that he would not have to work. He made me come there – in the evening. I told you – you thought I was at factory. Then – one night it snowed, and I couldn’t go back.  And last night – the cars were stopped. It was such a little thing – to ruin us all. I tried to walk, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want you to know. It would have – it would have been all right.

Example 6: The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

But he obstinately took roundabout ways, and presently he was where he could see long gray walls of vapor where lay battle lines. The voices of cannon shook him. The musketry sounded in long irregular surges that played havoc with his ears. He stood regardant for a moment. His eyes had an awestruck expression. He gawked in the direction of the fight.

Synonyms of Realism

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Realism and Naturalism

Introduction, general overviews.

• Anthologies and Collected Essays
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• Aesthetic Form in Literature and the Arts
• In the Context of US History
• Definition and the Relationship between Naturalism and Realism
• Philosophy, History, and Form
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• The City and Urbanization
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• 20th-Century Naturalism

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Realism and Naturalism by John Dudley LAST REVIEWED: 29 August 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 29 August 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0059

Variously defined as distinct philosophical approaches, complementary aesthetic strategies, or broad literary movements, realism and naturalism emerged as the dominant categories applied to American fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Included under the broad umbrella of realism are a diverse set of authors, including Henry James, W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, George Washington Cable, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Hamlin Garland. Often categorized as regionalists or local colorists, many of these writers produced work that emphasized geographically distinct dialects and customs. Others offered satirical fiction or novels of manners that exposed the excesses, hypocrisies, or shortcomings of a culture undergoing radical social change. A subsequent generation of writers, including Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Jack London, are most often cited as the American inheritors of the naturalist approach practiced by Emile Zola, whose 1880 treatise Le Roman Experimental applied the experimental methods of medical science to the construction of the novel. Governed by a combination of heredity, environment, and chance, the typical characters of naturalist fiction find themselves constrained from achieving the transcendent goals suggested by a false ideology of romantic individualism. Over the past century, critics and literary historians have alternately viewed realist and naturalist texts as explicit condemnations of the economic, cultural, or ethical deficiencies of the industrialized age or as representations of the very ideological forces they purport to critique. Accordingly, an exploration of these texts raises important questions about the relationship between literature and society, and about our understanding of the “real” or the “natural” as cultural and literary phenomena. Though of little regard in the wake of the New Critics’ emphasis on metaphysics and formal innovation, a revived interest in realism as the American adaptation of an international movement aligned with egalitarian and democratic ideology emerged in the 1960s, as did an effort to redefine naturalist fiction as a more complex form belonging to the broader mainstream of American literary history. More recently, the emergence of deconstructive, Marxist, and new historicist criticism in the 1980s afforded a revised, and often skeptical, reevaluation of realism and naturalism as more conflicted forms, itself defined or constructed by hegemonic forces and offering insight into late-19th- and early-20th-century ideologies of class, race, and gender.

In the wake of Parrington’s attempt to reconcile the rise of realism and naturalism with an essentially romantic tradition ( Parrington 1930 ), interest in the rise of these movements has occurred in waves. In particular, efforts to provide large-scale summaries reflect the attention to social problems in 1960s, and the influence of—and reaction to—post-structuralism and cultural criticism in the 1980s. In all cases, however, comprehensive hypotheses about the nature of realism and naturalism remain grounded, to a large extent, in the political, economic, and cultural history of the late 19th century. Berthoff 1965 , Pizer 1984 , and Lehan 2005 represent attempts to accommodate the horizons established by Parrington’s definition of the study of literary form. Kaplan 1988 , Borus 1989 , and Bell 1993 each make valuable contributions to the new historicist reexamination of naturalism. Murphy 1987 offers one of the few comprehensive accounts of realism within dramatic literature.

Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Provides compelling readings of the canonical authors, suggesting little common ground beyond the fact that both realism and naturalism explicitly reject the conventional dictates of artistry and dominant notions of style. Unified in their attraction to “reality” as an abstraction, Howells, Twain, James, Norris, Crane, Dreiser, and Jewett each constructed radically unique responses to a common “revolt against style” (p. 115)

Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919 . New York: Free Press, 1965.

Suggests that realism as a category may be best understood though an examination of practice, rather than through the study of principles or theories. In this light, establishes forceful reading of realist novels as varied statements of outrage and opposition to the increasing materialism, disorder, and perceived moral decay in the years leading up to World War I.

Borus, Daniel H. Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Draws on concerns of new historicism, yet emphasizes the process of literary publication and reception itself. Explores Howells, James, and Norris in detail, with some attention to other writers, including compelling discussions of the publishing industry, literary celebrity, and rise of the political novel.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Includes a concise summary of earlier critical debates about realism (including and subsuming naturalism) and describes the cultural work in novels of Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser to construct social spaces that contain and defuse class tensions emerging in the late 19th century. Among the more influential new historicist interventions.

Lehan, Richard Daniel. Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Resolutely formalist overview of realism and naturalism as literary modes. Describes the philosophical and cultural assumptions that helped shape these movements and traces their development throughout the 20th century. At times polemical in its dismissal of post-structuralist or materialist rereadings (see, for example, Kaplan 1988 ; Howard 1985 or Michaels 1987 , both cited under Philosophy, History, and Form ), nonetheless immensely useful and readable synthesis of key ideas.

Murphy, Brenda. American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

A treatment of realism in American theater, tracing the development of realist ideas about dramatic representation and their subsequent influence on American dramatists of the 20th century, including Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, and others. Addresses the scant attention paid to the theater in the scholarship on realism.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920 . Vol. 3, Main Currents in American Thought . New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930.

Though left incomplete at Parrington’s death, offers what would become the dominant view of realism and naturalism for much subsequent criticism. Sees these movements as antitheses of idealism represented by the Emersonian tradition, providing a needed corrective to “shoddy romanticism” that threatened to consume the American literary tradition.

Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature . Rev. ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Revision of essential 1966 work, offering a comprehensive formal theory of realism and naturalism, linked by adherence to an ethical idealism that informs, restructures, and complicates the diversity of themes and topics, the often bleak subject matter, and the presence of a deterministic worldview. Collects a variety of essays that construct a coherent portrait of the movements and their defining tensions.

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REALISM IN LITERATURE

2023, REALISM IN LITERATURE

Realism in literature is a pivotal literary movement that emerged in the mid-19th century and has since left an indelible mark on contemporary writing. This paper explores the concept of realism in literature, its historical context, vital characteristics, and the notable authors who championed this artistic approach. It also analyses pertinent and artistic productions of realistic literature through the "Novel" and other literary genres. By investigating the motivations that propelled this literary movement and its substantial contributions to the portrayal of human life, this paper provides an immense comprehension of how realism continues to exert its influence and shape contemporary storytelling.

Related Papers

Ana Falcato

This article reinterprets the evolution of formal realism in the novel since its inception up to the modernistic turn starting in the last decade of the nineteenth-century. My main argument is that realism in the novel is connected to a central philosophical issue: the issue of representation. The core value of the novel can be defined as a commitment to represent the world as it really is, rather than, as Terry Eagleton puts it, “how some ancient Egyptian priest or medieval knight conceived of it”. Yet the very concept of “representation” became a point of difficulty in literature and in modern philosophy, seeing that one cannot compare linguistic representations with reality itself as a test for accuracy because what we mean by “reality” already involves issues of representation. To better understand this puzzle, I examine two explanatory-models – one focusing on the critical development of literary conventions, the other on psycho-sociological developments – concluding that none of them can, alone, explain the impulse toward realistic representation and the evolution of key formal literary techniques that led to the modernistic turn.

Lauren Goodlad

Realist fiction has been an object of fascinated suspicion since the late-nineteenth century: modernists, structuralists, poststructuralists, and Marxists are among those to have characterized the realist novel as aesthetically bland and/or ideologically reactionary. But realist fiction—in dialogue with the realisms of photography, film, television, and other media—has lived to tell another tale. Scholars in various fields have begun to hold that while realist narrative responds to capitalist permutations across space and time, it is—for that very reason—a transnational medium shot through with aesthetic possibility. The essays in this special issue reject the reflex to prejudge realist art and expand the category to include the realisms of late-Victorian theater, postcolonial fiction from African, Egyptian, and Indian milieus; and photojournalistic experiments wrought in response to revolution in Latin America. What is constant throughout is the certainty of realism’s aesthetic flexibility, historical variability, and irreducibility to any single genre, period, technique, or national project. Realist art is both constitutively worlded (in taking the material world for its premise) and worlding (in making new ways of seeing, knowing, thinking, and being palpable to those worlds). After providing a brief survey of realism’s critical reception and some postulates for future scholarship, this introduction lays out the arc of the special issue.

Mark Fitzpatrick

A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914

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Christophe Den Tandt

These course notes offer a survey of classic American realist fiction. They include detailed analyses of Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, and Kate Chopin.

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17 Realism Introduction

Amy Berke; Jordan Cofer; and Doug Davis

After the Civil War and toward the end of the nineteenth century, America experienced significant change. With the closing of the Western frontier and increasing urbanization and industrialization , and with the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad and the advent of new communication technologies such as the telegraph, America began to emerge as a more unified nation as it moved into the Industrial Age . As immigration from both Europe and Asia peaked during the last half of the nineteenth century, immigrants provided cheap labor to rising urban centers in the Northeast and eventually in the Midwest. There was a subsequent rise in the middle class for the first time in America, as the economic landscape of the country began to change. The country’s social, political, and cultural landscape began to change as well. Women argued for the right to vote, to own property, and to earn their own living, and, as African-Americans began to rise to social and political prominence, they called for social equality and the right to vote as well. Workers in factories and businesses began to lobby for better working conditions, organizing to create unions. Free public schools opened throughout the nation, and, by the turn of the century, the majority of children in the United States attended school. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, activists and reformers worked to battle injustice and social ills. Within this heady mix of political, economic, social, and cultural change, American writers began to look more to contemporary society and social issues for their writing material, rather than to the distant or fictional past.

The first members of the new generation of writers sought to create a new American literature, one that distinctly reflected American life and values and did not mimic British literary customs. At the same time, these writers turned to the past, toward writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper, and reacted against their predecessors’ allegiance to the Romantic style of writing which favored the ideal over the real representation of life in fiction. William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James wrote prolifically about the Realistic method, where writers created characters and plot based on average people experiencing the common concerns of everyday life, and they also produced their own literary masterpieces using this style.

All writers in the Realistic mode shared a commitment to referential narrative. Their readers expected to meet characters that resembled ordinary people, often of the middle class, living in ordinary circumstances, who experienced plausible real-life struggles and who often, as in life, were unable to find resolution to their conflicts. Realists developed these characters by using ordinary speech in dialogue, commensurate to the character’s social class. Often in Realistic stories, characterization and plot became intertwined, as the plot was formed from the exploration of a character working through or reacting to a particular issue or struggle. In other words, character often drove the plot of the story. Characters in Realistic fiction were three-dimensional, and their inner lives were often revealed through an objective, omniscient narrator.

Realists set their fiction in places that actually existed, and they were interested in recent or contemporary life, not in history or legend. Setting in Realistic fiction was important but was not limited to a particular place or region. Realists believed in the accuracy of detail, and, for them, accuracy helped build the “truth” conveyed in the work. The implied assumption for these writers is that “reality” is verifiable, is separate from human perception of it, and can be agreed upon collectively. Finally, Realistic writers believed that the function of the author is to show, not simply tell. The story should be allowed to tell itself with a decided lack of authorial intrusion. Realistic writers attempted to avoid sentimentality or any kind of forced or heavy-handed emotional appeal. The three most prominent theorists and practitioners of American Literary Realism are Mark Twain, often called the comic Realist; William Dean Howells, often termed the social Realist; and Henry James, often characterized as the psychological Realist.

Two earlier literary styles contributed to the emergence of Realism: Local Color and Regionalism . These two sub-movements cannot be completely separated from one another or from Realism itself, since all three styles have intersecting points. However, there are distinct features of each style that bear comparison.

Local Color (1865-1885)

After the Civil War, as the country became more unified, regions of the country that were previously “closed” politically or isolated geographically became interesting to the populace at large. Readers craved stories about eccentric, peculiar characters living in isolated locales. Local Color writing therefore involves a detailed setting forth of the characteristics of a particular locality, enabling the reader to “see” the setting. The writer typically is concerned with habits, customs, religious practices, dress, fashion, favorite foods, language, dialect, common expressions, peculiarities, and surrounding flora and fauna of a particular locale. Local Color pieces were sometimes told from the perspective of an outsider (such as travelers or journalists) looking into a particular rural, isolated locale that had been generally closed off from the contemporary world. In some stories, the local inhabitants would examine their own environments, nostalgically trying to preserve in writing the “ways things were” in the “good old days.” The Local Color story often involved a worldly “stranger” coming into a rather closed off locale populated with common folk. From there the story took a variety of turns, but often the stranger, who believed he was superior to the country bumpkins, was fooled or tricked in some way. Nostalgia and sentimentality, and even elements of the Romantic style of the earlier part of the century, may infuse a Local Color story. Often, the story is humorous, with a local trickster figure outwitting the more urbane outsider or interloper. In Local Color stories about the Old South, for example, nostalgia for a bygone era may be prevalent. The “plantation myth” popularized by Thomas Nelson Page, for instance, might offer a highly filtered and altered view of plantation life as idyllic, for both master and slave. Local Color stories about the West, such as Mark Twain’s “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” might offer raucous stories with stock characters of gamblers or miners who outwit the interloper from the city, who flaunts his intellectual superiority over the locals. An early African-American writer, Charles Chesnutt, used the Local Color style of writing to deconstruct the plantation myth by showing the innate dignity, intelligence, and power of slaves or former slaves who outwit the white racist landowners.

Local Color writing can be seen as a transitional type of writing that took American literature away from the Romantic style and more firmly into the Realistic style. The characters are more realistically drawn, with very human, sometimes ignoble, traits: they swear, speak in regional dialect, swat flies away from their faces, and make mistakes; they are both comic and pitiable. The setting is realistically drawn as well: a real-life location, with accurate depictions of setting, people, and local customs. Local Color writing, however, does not reach the more stylistically and thematically complicated dimensions of Realistic writing. Local Color works tend to be somewhat sentimental stories with happy endings or at least endings where good prevails over evil. Characters are often flat or two-dimensional who are either good or bad. Outlandish and improbable events often happen during the course of the story, and characters sometimes undergo dramatic and unbelievable changes in characterization. Local Color did, however, begin a trend in American literature that allowed for a more authentic American style and storyline about characters who speak like Americans, not the British aristocracy, real-life American places, and more down-to-earth, recognizably human characters.

Regionalism (1875-1895)

Regionalism can be seen as a more sophisticated form of Local Color, with the author using one main character (the protagonist) to offer a specific point of view in the story. Regionalist writers often employ Local Color elements in their fiction. After all, they are concerned with the characteristics of a particular locale or region. However, regionalist writers tell the story empathetically, from the protagonist’s perspective. That is, the Regional writer attempts to render a convincing surface of a particular time and place, but investigates the psychological character traits from a more universal perspective. Characters tend to be more three-dimensional and the plot less formulaic or predictable. Often what prevents Regional writers from squarely falling into the category of “Realist” is their tendency toward nostalgia, sentimentality, authorial intrusion, or a rather contrived or happy ending.

In Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron,” for example, the story has a number of features of Local Color stories: characters speak in a New England dialect, the landscape is described in detail, the customs and rituals of farming class families are described, and an outsider—the young male ornithologist—comes to this secluded region with a sense of superiority and is thwarted in his endeavors by young Sylvy who refuses to give up the secret location of the heron. However, the story is told from the perspective of Sylvy, and readers gain insight into her inner conflict as she attempts to make a difficult decision. We gain awareness of Sylvy’s complexity as a character, a young girl who is faced with making an adult decision, a choice that will force her to grow up and face the world from a more mature stance. Jewett does, at times, allow the narrator to intrude in order to encourage readers to feel sympathy for Sylvy. Therefore, the story does not exhibit the narrative objectivity of a Realistic story.

Regionalism has often been used as a term to describe many works by women writers during the late nineteenth century; however, it is a term which, unfortunately, has confined these women writers’ contribution to American literature to a particular style. Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, for example, certainly wrote about the New England region, but their larger focus was on ordinary women in domestic spaces who seek self-agency in a male-dominated culture. Kate Chopin set most of her works among the Creole and Acadian social classes of the Louisiana Bayou region, yet the larger themes of her works offer examinations of women who long for passionate and personal fulfillment and for the ability to live authentic, self-directed lives. Like the established theorists of Realism—Howells, Twain, and James—women writers of the time, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Ellen Glasgow, who are generally not thought of as Regional writers, produced work which often defied strict labeling and which contributed to the beginning of a feminist tradition in American literature. While literary labels help frame the style and method of stories written in the late nineteenth century, most literary works—especially those that have withstood the test of time—defy reductionism.

In America, industrialization can be seen as the process by which advances in technology in the nineteenth century led to the shift from farm production to manufacturing production.

In America, the rise of industry in the mid to late nineteenth century and beyond caused a shift in America from a primarily agrarian economy to an industrial economy.

America saw a steep rise in immigration in the nineteenth century, as people from other countries moved to America for a variety of personal and political reasons but primarily to find work in America’s growing industries, including the building of the transcontinental railroad.

Local color is a type of writing that became popular after the American Civil War. It is a sub-movement of writing that generally preceded and influenced the rise of Realism in American writing while it still retained some features of the Romanticism, the movement which preceded it. Local color writing focuses on the distinctive features of particular locale, including the customs, language, mannerisms, habits, and peculiarities of people and place, thereby predicting some aspects of the Realists’ writing style, which focused on accuracy and detail. However, in Local Color stories, the characters are often predictable character types rather than the complex characters offered by Realist writers. Additionally, Local Color stories often retain Romantic features of emotion (including sentimentality and nostalgia) and idealism (with endings that are neatly resolved). Examples include Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.

Regionalism is a type of writing that was practiced after the American Civil War. It is a sub-movement of writing that generally preceded and influenced the rise of Realism in American writing. Regionalism, like Local Color, employs a focus on the details associated with a particular place, but Regionalist stories often feature a more complex narrative structure, including the creation of a main protagonist who provides the perspective or point of view through which the plot of the story is told. Such a shift in the technique of narration aligns Regionalist writers more closely with Realist writers, who are known for their complex characters who exhibit psychological dimensionality. However, Regionalist stories, like Local Color stories, often retain Romantic features of emotion (including sentimentality and nostalgia) and idealism (with endings that are neatly resolved).

In Kate Chopin’s work, the French Creoles are of Spanish or French descent. They are typically white and are considered members of the upper class.

In Kate Chopin’s work, the Acadians (or ‘Cadians) were of French or French- Canadian descent. They may be depicted as having a mixed racial and ethnic heritage, and they do not have the wealth and status that the Creoles have.

The advocacy of equality between the sexes. In the United States, feminism can be defined as a series of social, cultural, economic, and political movements that emphasized and called for equality for women.

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Realism in American Literature Essay

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Introduction

William dean howells, henry james, stephen crane, frank norris.

In literature, realism is applied to the school of fiction writers describing life with utmost fidelity to fact and detail in opposition to romanticism or classicism. This tendency towards realism is common in modern writing and at different periods, but it became a definite school primarily due to French influence in the later part of the 19 th century. This close analysis and stress on characterization is evident in Balzac and Stendahl, however it was Flaubert who surpassed them in “Madame Bovary”, his masterpiece. Flaubert’s achievement gave rise to works written by Goncourts, J.K. Huymans, de Maupassant, Zola and others. A heated controversy came up regarding the tendency of realistic writing to overstress what is corrupt and sordid; however their influence in the novel has become apparent and their detailed descriptions have lessened.

English realism has been tempered by moderation. Representing periods of its growth are George Eliot, Meredith, George Moore, Hardy, Wells and Bennett. This change is evidenced in the importance put on detailed psychological analysis, as in the novels of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Gorky, Cheknov, Strindberg, Sundermann, Couperons and Hamsum, typifying their respective countries. Corresponding tendencies in the drama are shown in the writings of Ibsen, Hamptman and Galsworthy. “In the United States, Wolfe, Hemingway and Faulkner are among the leading representatives of the modern school of realism.” (Groiler Encyclopedia, 1961: 279). This paper, hopefully will prove Howells, Twain, James, Crane and Norris, respectively prove how five American writers have been categorized as realists.

Our first realist, William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920) was an American man of letters born at Martin’s Ferry, Ohio on March 1, 1837. He was the son of William Cooper Howells, a newspaper proprietor. A compositor at his father’s printing office, he turned journalist with definite literary aims. He became consul at Venice, Editor of the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine. He also worked for the New York Times and the Cosmopolitan Magazine.

In 1862, he wed Elinor G. Mead and died May 11, 1920 in New York. He served as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from the time it was founded until he died. His 70 works consist of poems, travel books, essays, plays and criticism. His first book was a campaign life of Lincoln and of his books Venetian Life and Italian Journeys are delightful transcripts of personal experience, which cannot otherwise be authentic. He was chosen Leader of the Realistic School in American Literature. His novels reflect analytically the life of his time, realistically, but in proper perspective. “He was a successful short-story (as adjudged by Editha ), a penetrating critic and some of his poems reflect the qualities of his prose, which is consistently clear, compact, exact and felicitous. Several successful faces agreeably reflect his sweet and quiet humor.” (Groiler Encyclopedia, 1961: 30).

We now venture into Howell’s short story, Editha, which was first published in Harper’s Monthly in January of 1905. We hope to glean from it such qualities as will categorize it as realistic writing. To begin with, the setting of the story is the period circa the First World War, which occurred during Howells’ lifetime and Howells makes the reader believe the story actually happened, not just to the characters in the story, but also to many others. It is very clear even in the first paragraph how Howells’ pays attention to detail in his description of the setting. “The air was thick with the war feeling, like the electricity of a storm which had not yet burst. Editha sat looking out into the hot spring afternoon, with her lips parted, and panting with the intensity of the question whether she could let him go”

Lastly, the ending of the story isn’t what most romantics expect and desire. It ends with the sordidness of war. George gets killed and Editha fulfills her promise to him by going to visit his mother who fails to receive her with warmth. This is understandable and realistic since George’s mother cannot come to terms with the war as she and George’s father suffered greatly earlier war. But all’s well that ends well and the realistic approach is for the girl to pick up the pieces of her life and begin to live life again.

Our next American writer of realism is Samuel Clemens more popularly known as Mark Twain. Born in Florida, Missouri, November 30, 1835, Clemens claimed descent on his mother’s side from the Lambtons of Durham, England and on his father’s side, from men who were pirates and slavers. He started life as a compositor. In 1851, he became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. From this life was derived his pen name “Mark Twain”, a leadsman’s cry meaning two fathoms. He started his writing career as a compositor. After working as a reporter in Virginia City, Nevada, he tried mining and journalism in San Francisco and visited the Sandwich Islands.

Paying great attention to detail but without exaggeration is part of Twains’ realistic style of writing. “Mart Twain loved the little town of Hannibal. It was tranquilly content, content as slave towns are in general. He remembered it as the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning… the great Mississippi, the magnificent Mississippi rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun, the dense forest away on the other side.” (Paine, 1912: n.p.). His book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, is the story of an adventurous boyhood along the Mississippi. The realism here is that the account is much like the author’s own. The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a highly dramatic reflection of river life, and by common consent ranked as the author’s masterpiece. In 1907, Oxford University conferred on him the honorary degree, Doctor of Literature.

Still another proof of realism in Twain’s writing is this vivid representation of scenes in a letter to Will Bowen, a childhood friend: “The old life has swept before me like a panorama, the old life trooped by in their old glory again, the old faces have looked out of the mists of the past, old footsteps have sounded in my listening ears, old hands have clasped mine, old voices have greeted me and the songs I loved ages and ages ago have been wailing down the centuries.”(Cox, 1966: 78).

Henry James (1843 – 1916) comes next. He was an Anglo-American novelist, born in New York. He was the son of Henry James, a well-known Swedenborgian. His older brother was William James. He studied law at Harvard, but early turned his attention to literature, at first in the form of short stories and contributions to periodicals.

James first sent Daisy Miller to the Philadelphia magazine Lippincotts, which rejected it on the basis of their belief that the portrayal of Daisy was “an outrage on American girlhood.” After extensive revisions, he succeeded in burying the unassuming simplicity of his early style under the mannerisms of the Master. The novelette was a great success. His fellow realist, William Dean Howells wrote to James Russell Lowell: “There has been a vast discussion in which nobody felt very deeply, and everybody talked very loudly. The thing went so far that society divided itself into Daily Millerites and anti-Daisy Millerites. I was glad for it for I hoped that in making James so thoroughly known, it would call attention to the beautiful work he had been doing for very few readers.” (Moore 1878: n.p.).

Moore’s introduction to the Penguin edition draws parallels between Daisy and Huck Finn written by fellow realist Mark Twain and Emerson’s concept of self-reliance. Moore says, “For us, the readers, it is Daisy who is on the side of the angels, and I am sure that James meant it to be so, despite the fact that he invoked poetic justice in consigning her to her doom for being such a wicked flouter of convention. If there is one abiding theme which runs through the American experience it is that men and women must have the courage to go it alone, setting their faces resolutely against what they see as arbitrary and outmoded rules and regulations. The relating of this experience is definitely part of James being a realist.

Moore concluded by saying that in Daisy Miller, there is the seed of what we are to find in full bloom at the end of James’ career… the pitting of values of America against those of Europe. The reason Daisy has nothing in common with her fellow Americans in Rome is because they subscribe to the European way of looking at life, a way which so many of James’ novels reveal to be shallow, superficial and cynical. Daisy is honest, fresh and open.

The consensus of opinion regarding naturalism is that it is a sub-genre of realism. All naturalists are also realists; but not all realists are naturalists. The naturalists we shall touch upon are Frank Norris and Stephen Crane. Naturalism has been defined as “the doctrine that there is no interference of any supernatural power in the universe.” (Haddock, n.d.).

Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900), American writer was born in Newark, N.J. In 1890 he moved to New York City to do intermittent reporting for the Herald and Tribune. His first book, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, picturing life in the slums, was hailed as the first naturalistic novel of the U.S. In 1895 appeared, The Red Badge of Courage, Crane’s great realistic study of ordinary men amidst the storm and tumult of war. It was an instant success.

“Attention turned to Maggie and Crane’s reputation was established. In 1896, from experiences gained when he suffered shipwreck, he wrote The Open Boat, best know short stories. In 1899, he went to live in England where he died in 1900.”(Groiler Encyclopedia, 1961: 203)

Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat is characteristically realistic writing since it endeavors to describe life as it actually happened. It is also naturalism in that it involves the characters’ singular experience in their struggle against nature. The Open Boat is a fictionalized account of a very traumatic personal experience in Crane’s life: a ship on which he was a passenger sank off the coast of Florida, and he found himself one of four men in a tiny open dinghy, struggling to make it through a narrow strip of rough sea and pounding surf that separated them from dry land.

Many sailors or those who travel sea have, at one time or another, undergone a shipwreck experience, but what makes Crane’s narrative naturalist writing is that it accentuates the gulf between an objective journalistic rendering of going down with a ship and the only way to convey the full horror of this experience. In addition to vivid language, Crane uses carefully chosen anecdotes to make the situation seem harrowing.

Frank Norris (1870 – 1902), an American novelist was born in Chicago and educated in Paris, at Harvard and at the University of California. He was war correspondent in South Africa for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1896. He was editor of the San Francisco Wave in 1807. “The powerful realistic Mc. Teague, 1899, was his first novel to attract attention. His uncompleted trilogy, The Epic of the Wheat is generally considered his greatest work. In some ways, his writing seems to have been influenced by the French author, Alphonse Daudet.” (Groiler Encyclopedia, 1961: 73).

A Deal in Wheat by Norris has its protagonist in Sam Lewiston. The setting of the story is factual – a ranch in southwestern Kansas. Lewiston and his wife were two of a vast population of farmers, wheat growers who at that moment were passing through a crisis – a crisis that at any moment might culminate in tragedy. Unable to conduct his farm upon a paying basis at the time when Truslow, the “Great Bear” had sent the price of grain down to sixty-two cents a bushel, Lewiston had turned over his entire property to his creditors and left Kansas for good.

Norris’ account is the singular one – the only one of all the men who has struggled up to the surface again. How many others had gone down in the great ebb? Grim question, he dared not think how many. There were countless ones like Sam who were victims of a great wheat operation – a battle between Bear and Bull. What makes the story an exercise in naturalism is that although there were many who suffered just like Sam, it was only he who made it – who survived, perhaps by hard work or a streak of good luck.

After an extended analysis of the above-mentioned authors known to be American realists, it is not easy to come up with an original definition of American realism . Realism in American literature is a style of fiction writing influenced by the French in which life is described with strict fidelity to fact and detail. Naturalism , on the other hand is a sub-genre of American which involves the character/ characters’ singular struggle against the forces of war, nature and the like. Although there are a lot of similarities between American realism and European realism, from which it originated, the former puts a stress on that which is optimistic and aesthetic, reflecting the American way of viewing life.

Barnhart, C.E. (ed) (1959) The American College Encyclopedic Dictionary (Vols I and II). Chicago: Spencer Press Inc.

Cox, J. (1966) Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Groiler Encyclopedia. (1961) New York: Groiler International.

Haddock, P. (Pub) (n.d.) The Concise English Dictionary. USSR: Blackie and Son.

Moore, G. in James, H. (1878) Daisy Miller, A Study in Two Parts. New York: Harper and Brothers. 2007. Web.

Paine, A.B. (1912) Mark Twain, A Biography. New York: Harper and Brothers.

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Naturalism and realism.

• Gary Scharnhorst
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.509
• Published online: 26 July 2017

At the most elementary level, realism may be equated with verisimilitude or the approximation of truth. A mimetic artist, the literary realist claims to mirror or represent the world as it objectively appears. Naturalism may be given a trio of thumbnail definitions: pessimistic determinism, stark realism, and realism plus Darwin.

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Essays on realism.

by Georg Lukács

Edited by Rodney Livingstone

ISBN: 9780262620420

Pub date: May 10, 1983

• Publisher: The MIT Press

256 pp. , 6 x 9 in ,

ISBN: 9780262120883

Pub date: May 5, 1981

• 9780262620420
• Published: May 1983
• 9780262120883
• Published: May 1981

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Originally published in the 1930s, these essays on realism, expressionism, and modernism in literature present Lukacs's side of the controversy among Marxist writers and critics now known as the Lukacs-Brecht debate. The book also includes an exchange of letters between Lukács, writing in exile in the Soviet Union, and the German Communist novelist, Anna Seghers, in which they discuss realism, the European literary heritage, and the situation of the artist in capitalist culture.

Georg Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic.

Rodney Livingstone, Reader in German at the University of Southampton, has edited and translated numerous works by Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and others.

Considering [his] capacity for historical intervention and personal survival, the least one can say is that Lukács was the most successful Marxist intellectual of the 20th century.... The six essays and one public exchange of letters that David Fernbach's translation makes available to English readers were all written between 1931 and 1940, a period during which Lukács served the Comintern as one of its most formidable (and certainly its most erudite) critical hitmen. J. Hoberman The Village Voice

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The Realistic Novel in the Victorian Era

History of Realistic Victorian Novels

The Realistic Novel and its Formation The realistic novel was quite different than what has been seen with earlier literature. The most popular form of literature had always been poetry. The realistic novel changed that. This form of literature used journalistic techniques in order to make the literature something closer to real life with facts and general stereotypes of human nature. The attention to detail was made to just report the facts, not commenting or judging on the scene or character.

The novels were about the common man, which also happened to be the struggles of the lower class. These struggles usually included a lower class citizen trying to gain upward mobility. Thus, a subgenre called Social Realism was born. One of the most popular novels of this time is in the Social Realism genre. In Charles Dickens Great Expectations, the novel goes through a boy named Pip’s life, as he unexpectedly comes into money and is asked to become a gentleman. The novel follows Pip’s struggles, and focuses on telling the whole truth about the character, both his good and bad actions and the reasons behind them. He was meant to be a very tangible person, one that the average person of this time could relate to. Pip was written to be very “real”, with all his flaws and positive attributes.

The Rise of the Novel Prior to the Victorian Era, poetry had been the dominant form of literature. However, changes in class structure saw the novel rise in popularity. As the middle class expanded and more people became literate, the popularity of the novel exploded. These works also became more accessible as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of newspapers and the periodical press. Most notably, the works of Charles Dickens were frequently serialized in newspapers or journals, his first being Pickwick Papers in 1836. As a result of this serialization and a focus on character rather than plot, Dickens’ works are sometimes criticized for having weak plots. The subject matter of realistic Victorian novels also helped increase their popularity. Dickens particularly would portray the lives of working class people, creating characters that the new rising middle class audience could relate to. The realistic Victorian novel focused on characters and themes such as the plight of the poor and social mobility that was being afforded to a new middle class and the rising middle class were eager to consume these novels.

Evolution of the Realistic Victorian Novel

Queen Victoria’s reign lasted until 1901 and the literature that was being produced closer to the turn of the century shared few characteristics with the earlier works of the Victorian Era. Those writers at the end of the Victorian Era such as Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy. The novelists at the turn of the century continued to explore the problems in English social life, but explored other key themes as well. The greatest departure from the early Victorian era came from these authors exploration of themes such as sexuality and a focus on the ways in which science and technology would revolutionize the world in the upcoming century.

Characteristics of the Realistic Victorian Novel

• An emphasis on the here and now • Attention to specific action and verifiable consequences • Realists evoke common actions, present surface details, and emphasize the minor catastrophes of the middle class • They employ simple direct language and write about issues of conduct • Characterization is very important. There is often an abundance of characters and social types

What is Realism?

Quite obviously, the genre of realism is dedicated to identifying what is real and what is not. But, what exactly is “real?” Literature in Realism defines reality as something that exists prior to, and completely separate from, human thought or speech. Therefore, it is literature’s responsibility to accurately interpret and represent reality. As literature attempts to do this, it simultaneously depicts the anxieties, desires, and achievements of the Victorian time period. While Realism certainly encompasses its own unique ideas, the genre continued to utilize the strengths of empiricism and romanticism. For example, the topic of nature is still focused upon, but realistic literature acknowledges the fact that the human mind is a separate entity from nature. Therefore, realistic literature aims to answer the question of how the mind can possibly know and/or understand nature accurately. There are two main theories that assist in answering that question. Realism began as a literary movement in response to and as a departure from the idealism of the Romantic period. Realism emerged in literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, most predominantly in novels. Realism was characterized by its attention to detail, as well as its attempt to recreate reality as it was. As a result, plot was no longer the central to the focus of the author, but rather creating interesting and complex characters took precedence. Realism also placed an emphasis on describing the material and physical details of life, as opposed to the natural world as characterized by the Romantic period. Many Realistic novelists veered away from the softer aspects of Romanticism, such as intense tenderness and idealism, because they believed those characteristics misrepresented the harsh realities of life. Realism emphasizes accurate descriptions of setting, dress, and character in ways that would have appeared inappropriate to earlier authors. Realism, which emphasizes the importance of the ordinary person and the ordinary situation, generally rejects the heroic and the aristocratic and embraces the ordinary working class citizen.

Criticisms of Realism

The Realistic novel was very bold compared to the literature before its time. The realistic novel was meant to be like real life, so the literature would hold things in it that were taboo before, such as masturbation. It also showed a lot of the unfortunate events. Critics complained of authors only focusing on the negative, that focusing on the things that were falling apart were too unpleasant. Realistic novels, like real life, didn’t always have a happy ending. It was also noted that not much really happened in the plot of the novels. The attention to detail of the character led to little plot development and payoff.

Representational vs. Revelation Theories and the Importance of the Word “Idea”

Representational theories are specifically concerned with what separates the mind from the world surrounding it. Revelation theories, on the other hand, are more interested in the immediate knowledge of what is considered real, invoking either perception or intuition to achieve that knowledge. Moreover, in this light, it is equally important to acknowledge the word “idea.” How exactly does one define the word? In Victorian Realism, “idea” can be interpreted in two equally meaningful ways: perceptual or linguistic representation. From these concepts, one can see the very direct influence of Lockean principles, which affirm that words function as representatives. To genuinely understand Victorian Realism, it is almost necessary to first acknowledge that nothing is “real,” (a revelation, as it were). Following that understanding is the comprehension of the paramount concept of representation: nothing is real until the human mind perceives it and assigns it valuable meaning.

Sometimes, Victorian realists of this time period admitted to being quite overwhelmed by the idea of a gap existing between the human mind and the rest of the world, or reality. One such realist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an English poet and artist, acknowledged how frightening this doctrine was, but at the same time, he expressed attraction to it as well. It seemed that he found these representational theories to be endlessly fascinating, as he came to realize that his artistic products might be entirely divorced from reality and the world around him. Perhaps it can comfort an artist, if he is able to produce something beautiful through his own subjective interpretation of reality. It can’t be an easy feat to create such art, and subsequently allow others, and even one’s self, to search for significance and meaning under the physical surface.

One of the most famous realistic writers, Charles Dickens, directed his attention more towards revelation theories than the representational. On the topic of reality being understood as what is immediately available to one’s senses, Dickens further highlighted the importance of memory, which he described as a kind of vision, or way of seeing the world. Moreover, in his narrative-style novel Great Expectations , memory is a key concept in the story, as Pip recalls all of the events from memory. Some readers complain about the fact that the novel does not offer anyone’s perspective other than Pip’s, but it is highly likely that Dickens chose to do this on purpose. He viewed memory and revelation theories as very important to realistic literature, and a narrative could be described as a kind of “written memory.” To write the novel from such a perspective begs an important and highly relevant question from the readers: How do we know that Pip’s descriptions and thoughts are accurate representations of reality? The honest answer is that we simply do not, and this kind of ambiguity leads to very interesting discussions about Victorian Realism.

Narratives and Suspense

Narratives were an extremely popular style of writing for Victorian Realism, as it easily invoked all the theories described above. Along with challenging the notion of what is real and what is not, comes the impression of suspense experienced by the readers. By suspense, the obvious interpretation of the word means that the reader experiences tension and anxiety throughout the perusal of a story, but an attractive one that motivates him to read further. At the same time, though, suspense also refers to the action of actually suspending judgment as both a Victorian reader and writer. But what is meant by “judgment?” Of course, it is only human nature to judge a piece of literature as one reads it, but in the topic of Victorian Realism, the judgment that should be suspended is actually referring to judgment of what the speaker in a narrative is portraying as “real.” Moreover, the reader is expected to take what the narrator says at face value. Additionally, judgment must also be suspended as a reader makes assumptions based upon his unique beliefs. Doing so brings us back to the earlier definition of suspense, in which the reader is meant to feel anxious about the rising action in a narrative. If a reader refuses to suspend his judgment in his assumptions, beliefs, and subjective interpretations of reality, he will not experience the pleasures of suspense that are meant to be felt.

For example, in Dickens’s Great Expectations , a great deal of suspense arises from the fact that Pip does not know, for the majority of the novel, who his benefactor is. The pleasure of reading the novel comes from readers’ guesswork about the identity of the benefactor. In general, when a secret emerges in Victorian fiction, and the suspense is lifted, things often turn out to be entirely different than what was expected. This realization is meant to be enjoyable for the reader, as it has most likely kept his attention while he has read the story. Also, in Great Expectations , the very fact that there are two different endings to the novel serves to create suspense for readers, and further promotes more thought-provoking discussion.

The End of Realism Realism characterized such a valiant parting from what readers had come to imagine from the novel. Critics, in some occasions, reasoned that Realism seemed to focus largely on any negative views of life. Things “falling apart” was a large captivation to most, however, it was quite the opposite for others. In some cases, readers were complaining about how in realistic fiction, there wasn’t much of interest happening. Their concern was also about how everything seemed to be more about talking and there wasn’t enough action to back anything up. Henry James, as a prime example, was criticized for his loquaciousness.

Realism had turned to Naturalism towards the end of the nineteenth century. With Naturalism, writers defined their character using their heredity and history. Qualities that people found distasteful in Realism, which was the fixation with character and the thoroughly dull plots, was intensified by Naturalism. The impact was uniquely because of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution that inspired other writers to branch out into something that differs from Realism. Whereas Realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also endeavors to govern “scientifically” the underlying forces, like the heredity and history, manipulating all of the actions of the subjects.

Popularity of the Realistic Victorian Novel

The most popular novels of the Victorian age were realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. Describing contemporary life and entertainment for the middle class. A ccording to Merriam Webster, popularity is the “state of being liked, enjoyed, accepted, or done by a large number of people”. So the popularity of the realistic Victorian Novel would be entirely dependent on the people who read them. For example, Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations was originally released weekly in newspaper publications and people enjoyed it so much that it became in high demand quickly, and eventually it was turned into a one novel. The realistic Victorian novels became popular because it was the first time characters in a novel were similar and connected to the people of the middle class.

Newspapers, Press, and Publishing: One very important source of information on the realistic novel’s popularity are the newspapers that wrote about them. In the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times there are two different instances, with two different articles, where Charles Dickens’s popularity and worth are celebrated, years after his death in 1870 (1892 and 1894).

The number of periodicals that were produced were greatly increased during this time period. By the early 19th century, there were 52 London papers and over 100 other titles. There was a massive growth in overall circulation of major events, information and weekly publication of literature. In 1802 and 1815 the tax on newspapers was increased. Unwilling to pay this fee, hundreds of untaxed newspapers made their appearance. The development of the press was greatly assisted by the gradual abolition of the taxes on periodicals. Both of these developments made the newspaper more affordable to a greater percentage of the population. Resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_British_newspapers#19th_century

The book publishing industry grew throughout the 19th century. There was a dramatic increase in literacy along with the growth of libraries and public schools. This provided a rapidly growing market for books. The introduction of technological advances allowed more volume at less cost. During the 19th century, big publishing firms emerged and some of these companies remain active in the industry today.

In the 19th century practices of paying authors began to standardize. Publishers paid a percentage based on the price of the book and number of books sold. During the Victorian period, the communication industry including publishing and printing of books accelerated the processes of economic, social and cultural change by dramatically increasing the volume and speed of which information, news and entertainment flowed through society.

Resource: http://eduscapes.com/bookhistory/commodity/5.htm

Education and Literacy See More Here /Education,+Literacy+and+Publishing+in+Victorian+England

The next best source of information on the realistic novel’s popularity are the number of copies sold over a certain number of years. Again, Dickens will be the main focus, with his Pickwick Papers having sold 40,000 copies per issue at the time Part 15 came into print, and then selling 140,000 copies by 1863 in book form and 800,000 by 1879. Furthermore, The first issue of David Copperfield sold 25,000 copies between 1849 and 1850. To add a bit of perspective to these numbers, at the beginning of the 19th century, books were a luxury. The price had recently rose to unprecedented heights, cutting out the middle class, even though they could have been the biggest consumers. Between 1828 and 1853 the average price of a book was said to have declined by forty percent, but that forty percent was off of an abnormally high starting price. At around the time of Dickens ninety to ninety-five percent of new publications were selling around five hundred copies or less (though this did not account for every new publication, considering Dickens’s statistics stated above, and other best selling authors).

Rise of Feminism and Important Female Novelists

The Victorian Era was a period of great social and political reform, especially regarding the role of women. Women began actively seeking equal social and legal rights as men, and one of the main ways they attempted to draw attention to their plight was through writing. Women wrote in order to make a living, contribute to the literary world, and most importantly change British society and fight for women’s rights. Voting and property rights, education opportunities, and employment restrictions were all issues women of 19th century Britain faced. Many women decided to address the issues in writing and publishing their work in order to make their voices heard and demand equality. As a result, Feminism started to gain momentum out of the frustration women faced with the openly unfair and worsening social and political situation (“I Take Up My Pen”). Some of the more popular female novelists of this time include Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. Many women of the Victorian Era published their work anonymously or under pseudonyms to ensure that their works would be given the same merit that works by male authors were granted. Using gender ambiguous pseudonyms, which all of the Bronte sisters did, allowed female novelists the freedom to create characters exactly the way they wanted without fear of being disrespected or not taken seriously because they were created by women.

The idea of the “New Woman” was also popular during the Victorian Era and served as a significant cultural icon. The New Woman was the opposite of the stereotypical Victorian Woman who was uneducated, reliant entirely on a man, and led an entirely domestic life. Instead, the New Woman was intelligent, independent, educated, and self-supporting. This ideology played a significant role in important social changes that would lead to redefining gender roles, improving women’s rights, and overcoming masculine supremacy. New Woman novels generally focused on rebellious women and were known for voicing dissatisfaction with the Victorian woman’s position in marriage and society overall. They strive to redefine a woman’s role in marriage and other societal norms, as well as fix the relationships between the sexes and support women’s professional aspirations (Diniejko).

Charlotte Bronte was one of the most prominent Realistic Victorian novelists and published most of her work under the gender neutral pseudonym “Currer Bell”. In her novels, Bronte created strong female heroines who possessed free thought, intellect, and strong moral character. She wrote for the women she saw as being oppressed by society, which included teachers, governesses, and spinsters. She felt that all of these women were imprisoned by society or circumstances beyond their control, and Bronte was impelled to speak out for them in her writing (Lowes). Unmarried, middle-class women either had to turn to prostitution or be a governess in order to earn a living. However, a governess has no security of employment, received minimal wages, and was isolated in the household with the label of being somewhere in-between a family member and a servant. The large amount of middle-class women who had to resort themselves to the ambiguous role of governess lead to a rise in popularity of the governess novel because it explored a woman’s role in society (“The Victorian Age”). The most popular example of a governess novel would be Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre , which is a fictional autobiography of the orphan Jane Eyre as she matures and becomes a governess at Thornfield manor. Jane is rebellious, resourceful, and brave woman, despite all the obstacles that stand in her way in a male-dominated society. Jane ultimately falls in love with Rochester, but breaks away from society because she marries him out of love and not for the labels or security of a man and money that it provides. Jane respects Rochester and doesn’t compromise her morals or her personality just to satisfy him, which Bronte believed to be very important (Lowes).

“While we did not like to declare ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ — we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice;” – Charlotte Bronte on why women writers used pseudonyms

Popular Victorian Authors and Their Realistic Novels

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) •Jane Eyre

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) •Great Expectations •Pickwick Papers •Oliver Twist

George Elliot (really Mary Evans) (1819-1890) •Middlemarch

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) •Jude The Obscure

Neo-Victorianism and The New Realistic Novel

The Neo-Victorian movement began as a revival of the social and literary elements of the Victorian Era. A Neo-Victorian Novel is a novel written in modern times that takes place in the 19th century and usually puts a spin on the characteristics of the Victorian Era. More often than not, these novels will point out and bring to light some of the follies of the Victorian Era. Another quality of Neo-Victorian writing is that it often tells the intimate stories of those who were not the center of Victorian novels because of social constructs, such as, women and servants. For an example, these novels bring to light the fact that woman were sexual and powerful beings, during a time period where that was not believed. Charles Dickens has been thoroughly discussed throughout this page as the representative Victorian Realistic Novelist. Therefore, “Girl in A Blue Dress” by Gaynor will be the Neo-Victorian Novel that will represent the reimagining of the Victorian Era because Dicken’s life is the subject of it. “Girl in a Blue Dress” was written in 2008 and takes place in 1870. It is inspired by the life and marriage of Catherine and Charles Dickens; represented by Dorothea and Alfred Gibson in the novel. This novel reimagines the mistreatment and eventual exile of Catherine at the end of her and Charles’s marriage. However, this novel sets Catherine, or Dorothea, as the narrator and protagonist of the story; giving us the inner thoughts and feelings of this devoted woman.

Some other Realistic Neo-Victorian Novels to look at:

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) “Mrs. Dalloway”

“The Waves”

“To The Light House”

Sarah Waters (1966-present) “Fingersmith”- takes place in the 19th century, written in 2002.

John Fowles (1926-2005) “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”- takes place in the mid 19th century, written in 1969.

A. S. Byatt (1936-present) “Angels and Insects: Morpho Eugenia”- takes place in 1860, written in 1992.

Erin’s Page

Kelsy’s Page

Allie’s Page

Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957. Print.

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Charlotte Bronte. Digital image. The Recessionista. N.p., 1 Jan. 2010. Web. 15 May 2015. < https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/files//2018/06/charlotte_bronte_for-web.jpeg >.

Dickens, Charles. Charles Dickens . Wikipedia, 2007. JPEG. < http://an.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens >.

Diniejko, Andrzej. “The New Woman Fiction.” The Victorian Web. Warsaw University, 17 Dec. 2011. Web. 05 May 2015.

“English Literature.” Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web. 17 May 2014. < https://www.britannica.com/shakespeare/article-13013 >.

“ENGLISH REALISM: THE VICTORIAN ERA (1837-1901).” Literature in English (UNICAN): ENGLISH REALISM: THE VICTORIAN ERA (1837-1901). Web. 19 May 2014. < http://literatureinenglishunican.blogspot.com/2009/12/english-realism-victorian-era-1837-1901.html >.

“George Eliot’s New Book.” The Derby Mercury [Derby, England] 10 April 1861. Web. 19 May 2014. < http://bit.ly/1k0Ftqd >.

“I TAKE UP MY PEN: 19TH CENTURY BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS.” Duke University Libraries. Duke University, 28 Jan. 2010. Web. 5 May 2015.

Levine, Caroline. The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Print.

Linnell, John. Harvest Moon . 1858. Oil paint on wood. Tate, Britain. < http://www.shafe.co.uk/art/landscape_15_-_realism.asp >.

Lowes, Melissa. “Charlotte Brontë: A Modern Woman.” The Victorian Web. The Victorian Web, 15 Feb. 2008. Web. 11 May 2015.

McGowan, John P. Representation and Revelation: Victorian Realism from Carlyle to Yeats . Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Print.

Nestvold, Ruth . “Literature at the Turn of the Century.” Literature at the Turn of the Century . N.p., n.d. Web. 17 May 2014. < http://www.ruthnestvold.com/endcent.htm >.

“Popularity.” Merriam-Webster.com . Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 19 May 2014. < http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/popularity >.

Rahn, Josh . “Realism.” The Literature Network. Jalic Inc., n.d. Web. 14 May 2014. < http://www.online-literature.com/periods/realism.php >.

“Realism.” – Literature Periods & Movements. Web. 13 May 2014. < http://www.online-literature.com/periods/realism.php >.

“Realism.” Realism . N.p., 11 Feb. 2003. Web. 16 May 2014. < http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/Realism.html >.

“The Continued Popularity of Charles Dickens’s Novels, at a period when the printing-press is turning out an unprecedentedly large crop of new fiction, is one of the most encouraging signs of the times.” The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times [London, England] 18 Aug. 1894. Web. 17 May 2014. < http://bit.ly/1vvkkca >.

“The Victorian Age.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. 1941-965. Print.

The Importance of Realism in Literature

This essay about realism in literature, exploring its emergence, defining characteristics, and notable examples. Realism, born in response to the romanticism of the 19th century, focuses on portraying everyday life and ordinary people without romantic idealization. It emphasizes relatable characters, social critique, and an objective portrayal of reality. Through works like Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” and Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” realism confronts societal issues and invites readers to reflect on their own lives. It’s not just a literary technique but a way to engage with the world authentically, offering insights into the human condition and the complexities of ordinary existence.

How it works

Realism in literature is like a magnifying glass held up to everyday life, intensifying the ordinary details that we might overlook and presenting them to us in a new light. Born in the mid-19th century amidst the social upheavals of industrialization and changing class dynamics, literary realism emerged as a countertrend to the romanticism that dominated the earlier part of the century. It ditched the heroics and exotic settings for the kitchen sink—literally. The minutiae of daily life, the struggles and aspirations of ordinary people became the new subjects of literature.

This was a shift from the escapades of the nobility to the trials of the common man and woman, reflecting a broader democratization of attention and empathy.

What defines realism? At its core, realism is committed to an objective portrayal of life, striving to present the world exactly as it is, without the sugarcoating of romantic idealization or the exaggerations of melodrama. This commitment manifests in a few key characteristics that mark the style and substance of realist literature.

First, realism is characterized by its focus on believable, relatable characters. These aren’t heroes on epic quests or damsels in distress, but everyday people dealing with everyday problems. In realist novels, characters are defined by their environment, their social status, and the mundane challenges they face—from financial woes to familial strife. They are complex, often flawed, and portrayed with psychological depth. The beauty of realism lies in its ability to develop characters that could walk off the page into the real world without anyone batting an eye.

Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” is often cited as a definitive example of literary realism. It narrates the story of Emma Bovary, a doctor’s wife who, disillusioned by the banalities of provincial life, seeks solace in romantic novels and eventually, in the arms of others. Emma’s character is tragic, not because she is inherently noble or unduly victimized, but because her ordinary flaws and desires lead to her downfall. Flaubert’s meticulous depiction of Emma’s world, from the drudgery of her daily routines to the texture of the very fabric of her dresses, ensures that the reader is fully immersed in the reality of her existence. The contrast between her mundane environment and her vibrant, often destructive yearnings highlights the central conflict of realism—the clash between idealistic aspirations and harsh realities.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Mark Twain used realism to capture the essence of American life in the late 19th century. His “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” doesn’t just tell the story of a boy floating down the Mississippi River; it’s a canvas displaying the racial prejudices, moral ambiguities, and social hypocrisies of the American South. Huck’s narrative voice—fresh, naive, and colloquial—brings authenticity to the tale, making the social critique all the more potent because it is subtly woven into the fabric of a young boy’s adventures.

Realism is also a tool of social criticism, a way for writers to highlight issues and conditions that they see as unjust or worthy of attention. By presenting life as it is, they hoped to inspire empathy and perhaps demand action. Emile Zola’s novels, for instance, delve into the lives of the working poor, the underbelly of Parisian society, exposing the grim realities of labor and exploitation under the bright lights of the city. His detailed, unflinching descriptions force readers to confront uncomfortable truths about society and its often unseen mechanisms.

Realism, then, serves not just to entertain but to challenge. It asks readers to look more closely at the world around them, to recognize the struggles and triumphs of ordinary people, and to reflect on their own lives and societies. It strips away the glamour and escapism often found in literature to ground stories in the tangible, immediate concerns of real life.

But realism is not merely a passive reflection of reality. It is an active, deliberate choice to engage with the world as it is, rather than as we might imagine or wish it to be. This engagement gives realism its power and its enduring appeal. As society changes, the lens of realism adapts, offering fresh perspectives on the human condition and continuing to resonate with readers who see their own lives reflected in the trials and tribulations of the characters.

Realism has evolved, of course, and its principles have been adapted and expanded by subsequent literary movements. Yet, at its heart, the drive to depict life authentically remains a potent force in literature. It reminds us that at times, the most compelling stories are those that emerge from the simplest, most fundamental aspects of everyday existence.

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English Studies

This website is dedicated to English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, English Language and its teaching and learning.

Social Realism in Literature

Through authentic and faithful representation, Social Realism offers a platform for marginalized voices, a vehicle for social critique, and a means to advocate for societal change.

Introduction: Social Realism in Literature

Table of Contents

Social Realism in literature stands as a powerful and enduring artistic movement that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Rooted in a commitment to depicting the unvarnished truths of societal existence, it serves as a critical lens through which to examine the human condition and the world in which it unfolds. Central to its ethos is the portrayal of everyday life with a discerning eye, particularly focusing on the struggles, inequalities, and injustices that often remain obscured.

Through authentic and faithful representation, Social Realism offers a platform for marginalized voices, a vehicle for social critique, and a means to advocate for societal change. This literary approach is both a mirror reflecting the challenges of its era and a call to action, encouraging readers to confront and engage with the pressing issues of the day.

Exponents of Social Realism Literary Theory

Criticism Against Social Realism in Literature

• Overemphasis on Determinism : Critics argue that Social Realism sometimes portrays characters and social conditions as being overly determined by environmental or economic factors, which can lead to a deterministic and reductionist view of human nature.
• Simplistic Characterization : Some critics contend that Social Realist works tend to rely on stereotypes and one-dimensional characterizations, reducing the complexity of human beings to fit into predetermined social roles.
• Didacticism and Propaganda : Social Realism is occasionally criticized for becoming overly didactic or propagandistic, with authors using their works primarily as vehicles to convey a specific political or social message, potentially sacrificing the subtlety and depth of the storytelling.
• Neglect of Individual Experience : Critics argue that Social Realism’s focus on societal issues and larger social structures can overshadow the exploration of individual experiences, emotions, and psychological depth in characters.
• Pessimism and Grimness : Some contend that Social Realist works can be relentlessly pessimistic and grim, potentially leading to a sense of hopelessness and despair, especially if they do not offer solutions or paths to change.
• Lack of Diversity : Critics have pointed out that Social Realism can sometimes neglect the experiences and voices of marginalized groups or fail to adequately represent the full diversity of society.
• Artistic Limitations : Critics argue that the commitment to social and political critique in Social Realism can sometimes limit the range of artistic expression, leading to a potential neglect of aesthetics and experimentation.

Examples of Social Realism

Keywords in Social Realism Literary Theory

• Determinism : The belief that individual actions and outcomes are largely determined by external social, economic, or environmental factors, often explored in Social Realist literature.
• Working-Class : The socio-economic class comprising individuals who primarily engage in manual or industrial labor, a central focus in many Social Realist works.
• Social Injustice : The unequal distribution of resources, opportunities, or rights within a society, often addressed and critiqued in Social Realism literature.
• Urbanization : The process of a population shift from rural areas to urban centers, frequently depicted in Social Realism as it leads to changes in social structures and living conditions.
• Class Struggle : The conflict and tension between different socio-economic classes, a recurring theme in Social Realist literature.
• Industrialization : The transition from an agrarian or handicraft-based economy to one dominated by manufacturing and mechanized production, a key backdrop for many Social Realist narratives.
• Migrant Workers : Laborers who move from place to place in search of employment, often depicted in Social Realism as they face economic hardships and displacement.
• Materialism : The prioritization of material possessions and wealth over other values, often critiqued in Social Realism for its impact on society.
• Realism : The literary movement that aims to represent everyday life and society as truthfully and accurately as possible, a foundational aspect of Social Realist literature.
• Social Critique : The examination and analysis of societal issues, often with the aim of raising awareness and advocating for change, a central purpose of Social Realist literature.

Suggested Readings

• Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie . Doubleday, Page & Company, 1900.
• Dickens, Charles. Hard Times . Chapman & Hall, 1854.
• Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle . Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906.
• Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath . The Viking Press, 1939.
• Wright, Richard. Native Son . Harper & Brothers, 1940.
• Zola, Émile. Germinal . G. Charpentier, 1885.
• Gorky, Maxim. Mother . Boni and Liveright, 1906.
• Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence . D. Appleton and Company, 1920.
• Norris, Frank. McTeague . Doubleday, Page & Company, 1899.
• Anand, Mulk Raj. Untouchable . Hutchinson & Co. Publishers, 1935.

Related posts:

• African American Theory
• Archetypal Literary Theory / Criticism
• Hermeneutics in Literature
• Decolonial Literary Theory

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Still Life with Musical Instruments, Books, and Sculpture ( c 1650) by Evaristo Baschenis. Courtesy Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

A novel kind of music

So-called ‘classical’ music was as revolutionary as the modern novel in its storytelling, harmony and depth.

by Joel Sandelson   + BIO

Compare these two pieces. First, one of Henry Purcell’s fantasias for viols (1680). A short figure is imitated between voices, summoning a detailed web of melancholy counterpoint. The idea is spun out in elaborate developments: upside down, the entries piling up closer together, the tail extended into a sequence. The music contorts itself into harmonic paradoxes and clashes, perhaps reminiscent of the wit and double meanings of poetry by those other 17th-century Englishmen, John Donne and Andrew Marvell. This is music of great beauty and sophistication, but where does the piece as a whole take us? It falls clearly enough into large-scale sections (beginning at 1:38, 2:30 and 3:15) differentiated by a new character, tempo and theme. But their sequence feels additive rather than cumulative, with little sense of an overall narrative arc. To us modern listeners, the effect is something like looking at a richly embroidered tapestry, as if each line of counterpoint were a thread in a seamless, two-dimensional foreground.

Now try the first movement of Haydn’s 47th symphony (1774). Everything about it sounds in motion , from the level of each phrase to the piece as a whole – more like telling a story than seeing a static object from multiple angles. Each phrase is clearly directional, carefully proportioned, and distinct from its neighbours. Like a tour of the rooms and gardens of a rococo palace, the piece as a whole has a strongly differentiated beginning, middle and end: setting off, passing through varied surroundings, and returning to an altered version of where we began (from 4:16) with the benefit of experience. (Both halves of the movement are themselves repeated – if you want to hear it all through once, listen from 1:24 to 5:26). The music seems to evoke not just linear time but something like spatial depth; events in the musical foreground whose succession feels compelled by a purposeful underlying structure.

What changed in this century or so between Purcell and Haydn? Three crucial innovations of musical composition are part of the story. One is a much greater variety of texture – the surface events and gestures of the music. Another is a more unified, integrated approach to overall structure, based on large-scale repetition and resolution. The last is a new system of harmony that was able to create a sense of proximity and distance, foreground and depth, over extended periods of time. I want to suggest some parallels between this 18th-century musical lingua franca and a familiar device from another medium: modern realist prose, which emerged through the 17th and 18th centuries – just when these musical conventions took shape.

W e habitually associate literary realism with things like down-to-earth subject matter, plausible detail and convincing chronology. For the ancients, though, realism had just the opposite meaning. Aristotle argued that art should transcend the mass of incidental details around us and deal with the more important reality of universals. On this view, art imitates reality not by directly copying things around us, but by somehow reflecting our broad experience of reality through its modes of representation. But in the wake of the empiricist philosophy and science of the 1600s and 1700s, this idea was turned on its head: what was ‘realistic’ was now the flux of particulars. This updated notion of realism found classic expression in the novel – novels that depicted particular people having particular experiences at particular times and places. For the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, writing in the 1930s, the quintessential feature of the modern novel was ‘heteroglossia’: a riotous mixture of voices, characters and styles, which undermines the claim to authority of any one of them. And this opens up a tempting musical parallel.

In the early decades of the 18th century, just as the first modern novels were gaining purchase among a new reading public, a new kind of opera from Naples was sweeping Europe. It was a comic style later called opera buffa , distinguished from its forebears by its depiction of multiple character types. Opera seria (and its French equivalent, tragédie lyrique ), to which buffa was a democratic alternative, had been based principally on classical subjects featuring characters of noble or mythological origin. It was structurally more static, too: each seria aria froze the forward motion of the plot and expressed the singing character’s particular passion at that moment, through highly conventionalised means. In the new comic style, contrasting styles, textures and topics jostled together in close proximity; this dazzling variety was imported from the opera house into instrumental music by mid-century galant composers like Giovanni Battista Sammartini and Johann Stamitz.

In his dialogue Rameau ’ s Nephew (1805), Denis Diderot has his title character both advocate and imitate the disjointed discourse of the modern style. ‘We need exclamations, interjections, suspensions, interruptions, affirmations, and negations,’ he says. ‘No more witticisms, epigrams, neat thoughts – they are too unlike nature.’ Whereas a string of arias in a Handel opera seria (or a sequence of dance movements in a baroque suite) each inhabit a singular affect and isolated vantage point, an ensemble finale in a comic opera or a symphony movement of the later 18th century give us a carnival of distinct characters.

There are few consistent spatial or temporal relationships, and little sense of realistic cause and effect

So one thing in common between novels and certain musical genres of the period is a palimpsest of voices and styles, a seething mass of surface particulars. But they are just that – a surface. I want to turn to a more profound theory of realism to recognise isomorphisms between the arts on a more significant level.

In her book Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (1983), Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth argues that a central preoccupation of realist art in general, both in literature and painting, is the projection of a neutral, communal sense of time and space. Premodern narratives, in her account, were typically structured around separate, unreconciled points of view. (Battle scenes in the Iliad , for instance, describe one hero attacking and then another falling, rather than the fight between them.) Each character has a destiny tied to the centre of the universe. Things gain their significance in relation to the divine order, not to each other. There are few consistent spatial or temporal relationships, and little sense of realistic cause and effect.

The later achievement, according to Ermarth, was to create a point of view that was anonymous, arbitrary and partial, but at the same time a unifying force: an ‘energy source everywhere in the work’ that serves to ‘homogenise the medium’. A central device of the realism of the 18th and 19th centuries was the invisible narrator. This all-knowing voice creates the illusion of a shared, quantifiable reality, allowing writers to unify huge volumes of detail through naturalistic vectors of space and time. And the sense of unity is not just spatial and temporal, but psychological. When we freely move between the interior thoughts of two characters in a novel by George Eliot or Dickens, we gain insight into their minds through the unifying consciousness of the narrator.

How might music of the same period reflect these preoccupations? To make the connection, we have to look at two fundamental features of the Enlightenment’s musical language: form and harmony.

W riting to his father from Paris in 1778, Mozart described the success of his latest symphony:

[J]ust in the middle of the allegro a passage occurred which I felt sure must please, and there was a burst of applause; but as I knew at the time I wrote it what effect it was sure to produce, I brought it in once more at the close.

What’s new here is not just the notion of a composer tailoring his music to the tastes of a public concert audience (though new it was). A more subtle emphasis in his words is upon the very idea of music’s sequential disposition.

In his book Bach ’ s Cycle, Mozart ’ s Arrow (2007), Karol Berger argues that an important shift in musical temporality took place between his two titular composers: a static, ‘eternal Now’, evoking the timelessness of the divine, giving way to a dynamic and goal-directed flow of time. In the middle of listening to one of Bach’s fugues , it’s actually quite hard to locate ourselves in the overall structure. Bach is concerned with the potential for development of his fugue subject (heard alone at the beginning) – a catalogue of inventions that could take place in almost any order. On the other hand, once music’s specific sequential ordering was felt to be significant, a piece could be understood as in some way analogous to a story. Later 18th-century listeners therefore came to hear music in explicitly narrative terms.

For an early biographer of Haydn, one of the composer’s symphonies brought to mind a story of considerable complexity about man setting sail for America. His account freely mixes musical detail with narrative, each influencing the other:

At this point, the opening theme of the Symphony returns. But soon the sea begins to grow rough, the sky darkens and a fearful tempest advances with a clashing of key-signatures and a quickening of the tempo. Aboard the ship all is wild disorder. The cries of the sailors, the pounding of the waves, the howling of the gale whip up the melody from chromatic to pathetic.

One thing in particular allows the musical structures of Mozart and Haydn to afford a sense of narrative, and it’s something so obvious that it usually goes unmentioned. Repetition of one kind or another is endemic to most music as a basic tool of coherence – like the close-knit imitation between voices in that Purcell we began with. But larger-scale formal repetition, which involves a significant passage of music repeating on a broad, structural level (perhaps in some kind of ‘resolving’ way the second time, after a contrasting middle) is a higher-order, emergent feature: it depends on a surface varied enough to enable larger structures to stand out in relief. In itself, this was nothing new; just think of the refrains of popular songs since time immemorial. But over the long 18th century, it becomes a virtual sine qua non across all genres, and not just when motivated by a verbal text.

Most of this music seems to lack endings of any real force, given the low degree of internal tension to resolve

Vivaldi’s concerto movements, for instance, alternate between an orchestral ritornello (‘return’) in various related keys, and more exploratory episodes for the soloist. Almost every movement of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, composed between 1800 and 1824, involves a decisive structural return: from the revolutionary quest of the Eroica symphony’s first movement to the humble clockwork-driven intermezzo of the eighth. A reprise might be as modest as in many of Domenico Scarlatti’s three-minute sonatas: two halves, each repeated, the second shuffling around some earlier ideas and sealed with a pithy ‘end rhyme’ with the first half. And even the most capricious and whimsical sorts of pieces rely on it. C P E Bach’s fantasias for keyboard, impulsive expressions of inner sensibility, and Schubert’s impromptus, notated records of the composer’s far-reaching improvisation at the piano, all repeat long passages.

It might seem as though the very idea of literal reprise is so basic as to be inevitable, but it’s actually a striking rarity in music before the later 17th century. A cantata by Carissimi or Schütz, or an instrumental piece by Marini or Sweelinck (all of the early to mid-1600s) fall into clear sectional structures, but without a sense of overall repetition. The keyboard virtuoso Frescobaldi even prefaced his first book of toccatas (1615) with permission for the performer to start and end each piece wherever desired, conceiving of the music more as a compendium of effects and affects than an integrated plot to be followed from start to finish.

Unity might be achieved through other means: a repeating but developmental formula like a ground bass , or a pre-existing popular tune or chorale melody unfolding slowly in one voice. Notice, too, how most of this music seems to lack endings of any real force, given the low degree of internal tension to resolve. (By contrast, fast-forward a century and a half to Beethoven’s famously long and tautologous endings : they sound like absolutely necessary outcomes of what precedes them. Like a large aircraft needing a long runway to slow down, the ferocious forward momentum of the music needs a proportionately satisfying grounding.) Heard through ears trained by 18th-century conventions, this earlier music can sound somewhat open-ended or structurally ‘flat’ – perhaps akin to the experience of reading certain pre-realist literature. In his great study Mimesis (1946), Erich Auerbach writes that medieval prose romances ‘string independent pictures together like beads’, each separated by blank intervals of time and no sense of historical progression. In medieval and other pre-perspectival painting, too, each object or figure exists in its own foreground, with no overall vantage point to create a single spatial continuum.

A musical reprise has an inherent doubleness, a simultaneous past and present. It functions as an index of time elapsed and distance travelled. An important feature of realist narrators is a similar temporal doubleness: a present-tense narration of past events arranged in a clear sequence, giving the story a forward-straining direction. (This may have a philosophical provenance: in early modern thought, especially Locke and Hume, the relationship between memory and present awareness becomes an increasingly important determiner of personal identity.)

A vivid example of this convention in its earliest, most vulnerable phase is Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). Much of the story is told through a series of letters from the maidservant heroine, some written just moments after the events they describe. The story constantly threatens to catch up with the telling. Writing to her parents to complain of untoward comments by her master, she quickly signs off, later explaining: ‘I broke off abruptly my last letter; for I feared he was coming; and so it happened.’ Laurence Sterne’s novels take as their subject the possibility of linear storytelling itself: an autobiography that can’t decide on its own starting point and barely gets beyond age two and a half ( Tristram Shandy , 1759-67) and a travelogue of a journey through France and Italy with no clear purpose and the destination never reached ( A Sentimental Journey , 1768). The desire to include incidental details undermines the plot, because the sheer weight of detail stalls the narrative’s forward motion. But Sterne equally satirises its opposite, the idea of pure forward motion without pausing to take in anything on the way. Vowing to the reader to proceed at last with fewer digressions, Shandy draws literal ‘story lines’ that purport to illustrate the motion of his plot. The absurdity is clear: what would be the point of a story told in a straight line? How would it even be possible? Music and literature seem to discover the possibility of integrated, linear storytelling at almost the same time. To us, these techniques are second nature; back then, there were anxieties over it, as one can have only over something in its precarious infancy.

Plot lines in Tristram Shandy (1759-67) by Laurence Sterne. Courtesy the British Library

W e can find parallels that run just as deep in music’s harmonic dimension. Ermarth relates the narrative techniques of modern prose to the linear perspective first achieved in Renaissance painting: both represent time and space in communal, quasi-objective ways (the ‘consensus’ of her title). In perspectival art, all objects in a picture are situated in relation to a vanishing point. The picture plane itself intercepts imaginary lines that radiate from each object and converge on the viewer’s eyes, a simulation of the three-dimensional space that we perceive in the world. I want to suggest that the powerful engine of 18th-century tonality evokes something like this sense of spatial depth.

Earlier music relied in various ways on a creaking and inconsistent modal system. A mode (in this sense) is a scale made up of particular patterns of intervals. Each mode has a distinctive harmonic colour, and each tends to be associated with other musical traits, like recurring melodic formulas and characteristic emotions. As far back as the Republic , Plato banishes the ‘indolent’ Lydian from his ideal state but retains the ‘warlike’ Dorian. (The ancient Greek modes, it should be said, were quite different to later systems.) There was frequent ambiguity about the status of the modes: theorists in the 1500s and 1600s disputed their importance or even existence, seeing counterpoint as fundamental, and the modes merely as a system of classification. By the early 18th century, there were effectively only two possible modes left: our modern major and minor. This was a dramatic simplification that unlocked a great expansion. The energies of tonality – something like a gravitational or magnetic force between notes, chords or keys – could now operate on a much grander scale.

Realist narrative relies on an accretion of insignificant details like this

Listen to this dance music by Jean-Baptiste Lully for Molière’s comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670). The music is full of familiar gestures and cadences – the gravitational forces of tonality – but without moving away from the home key for long enough to escape its influence. We could say that the music temporarily rests ‘on’ other closely related keys, rather than moving ‘into’ them. Now try this concerto grosso by Corelli from just two decades later. The music now feels like it moves decisively ‘into’ nearby keys. Those local cadences in the Lully are stretched out over longer spans of time in the Corelli, spans that are padded out and given a phenomenological depth by the whirling, repetitive figurations for the soloists. Rather than dwelling on the bejewelled surface of a distinctive mode for its duration, music now began to move systematically between different transpositions of its starting key: what we call modulation. The power of tonal harmony is its recursion. It moves in the same way in its surface gestures as on a higher level.

Eighteenth-century pieces dramatise this potential for longer-range harmonic motion. A movement of a Vivaldi concerto or Haydn sonata stages a harmonic journey away from a tonic key to a closely related one, through more distant regions, before a satisfying homecoming. Each of these modulations requires an imaginary sort of ‘effort’, typically by the suggestion of a delicately weighted sequence of fifths above each new key. We have seen how large-scale repetition can suggest something like temporal depth. Could the tension we hear in a tonal piece between these two related ‘angles’ – the key we are in at a given moment and the overall tonic – produce something like a spatial equivalent?

Another way of looking at this is to say that harmonic structure becomes fundamentally relational, not absolute. Critics have detected just the same quality in the realist prose that flowered in the next century. Commenting on Flaubert’s description of a living room, Roland Barthes suggests that the piano might indicate the bourgeois standing of its owner and the boxes and crates a sign of messiness or decline of the household – but the barometer is just there , ‘neither incongruous nor significant’. Realist narrative relies on an accretion of insignificant details like this. These details are not symbolic or allegorical, alive with meaningful resonances; their only purpose is to evoke the texture of reality.

Characters in premodern literature are bundles of allegorical attributes, all their qualities open to view at all times. In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim ’ s Progress (1678-84) their very names announce who they really are: Christian, Hypocrisy, Goodwill. In later novels, on the other hand, when we meet a new character, they could be just about anyone. We discover who they are by accompanying them on a journey of experience through time and space. And so in music: a modern key doesn’t have any of the unique characteristics or flavours of one of the older modes – though some of these characteristics did survive through convention. All of them – any major or minor scale – have the same internal structure. What matters is how you get from one to another.

In philosophy from René Descartes onwards, matter is thought to be inert extension, devoid of meaning and spirit. Nature is homogeneous, to be measured with the uniform tools of geometry and clock time. This is the intellectual background to linear perspective and the techniques of literary realism. They go hand in hand with the new mechanical philosophy; they all express the modern impulse to rationalise. Erwin Panofsky, in a discussion of Italian Renaissance painting, suggests that linear perspective ‘seems to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness’. The musical techniques explored above play their own part in this story. A movement of an 18th-century mass also rephrases religious truths in ways comprehensible to the earthly. The liturgy is now arrayed along tonality’s rationalising, perspectival grid. Perhaps we, the listeners, replace God as the ideal vantage point of the music.

R evolutions in art don’t take place overnight, and many aspects of 18th-century music were caught between older and newer conceptions. Already present in J S Bach’s music , for instance, are the powerful forces of goal-directed tonality that he derived from the Italian concerto style, even though (as Berger argues) Bach is best thought of as a late representative of the older model of musical time. And much of the idiosyncratic music of the 1600s shows features in outline that would become more important in the next century. One of the first operas, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo of 1607, contains (appropriately enough for a story about a return from the Underworld) a ritornello punctuating its recitative-driven scenes. Each repetition summons us over and over again to Euridice’s fatal look back.

If we look at later 19th-century music, these conventions are as enduring – and as unquestioned – as their counterparts in literature and painting. The young Richard Strauss’s Don Juan (1889) is a virtuosic rendering in music of the seducer’s tale. The Don Juan legend itself has no literal large-scale repetitions. So why does Strauss feel the need to write a long, balancing reprise of the opening music (starting at 14:23) when there can be no direct literary justification? Perhaps he felt it necessary in order to achieve a ‘purely musical’ coherence, as a novel or painting achieves for itself by different means. Tellingly, the composer’s own written programme for the piece, which matches moments in the music to the story, falls silent during the long repetition – as if the passage were as integral but almost as unremarkable as the proscenium arch of a theatre or the canvas of a painting.

The textbooks call the late 18th century ’s music the ‘Classical’ era. In some respects, it’s an unfortunate label, giving a serene, abstract (and just plain ‘old’) quality to music that we could hear as endlessly contemporary and loaded with worldly significance. But perhaps there is a sense in which this music can be thought of as a ‘classical’, or perhaps a ‘classic’, style. The devices of literary realism, too, became classic: powerful but invisible conventions that pass themselves off as nature.

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ChatGPT is great at summarizing books. But will AI ever write a true work of literature?

• Contrary to popular belief, generative AI is capable of producing quality prose.
• While some writers resist the idea that AI can produce art alone, others use it as a tool for creative writing.
• It’s probable that AI will change literature the same way past innovations changed other arts.

It’s 2024 and fantasy author George R.R. Martin has officially spent 12 years working on The Winds of Winter , the long-awaited sixth installment in the series that inspired the HBO hit Game of Thrones . With no release date in sight, one tech-savvy fan decided to write the story himself, or rather, he asked ChatGPT to write it for him. Prompted to develop outlines for each chapter, and then turn those outlines into prose, the AI churned out a 683,276-word tome of surprising quality.

Surprising because although this “fan-made” version of Winds of Winter failed to live up to the standards of Martin’s work, it did contain the unexpected twists and turns that made his fantasy epic so successful. Among the book’s flabbergasted readers was Martin, who upon learning of its existence not only took legal action against the fan but also ChatGPT’s developer, OpenAI.

Joining the ranks of other bestselling authors such as John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen, Martin’s ongoing war with large language models — which were trained on their writing, among countless other sources — raises an important question about the creative capabilities of machine learning. Anyone who has used AI programs like ChatGPT in recent months knows they are great at summarizing textbooks and writing boilerplate cover letters, but can they also produce the kind of writing that moves us and speaks to our souls?

Training data

Journalist Vauhini Vara thinks the answer is yes. In an article titled “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer,” she relates how in 2020 OpenAI granted her early access to GPT-3. Defining creative writing mainly as “waiting for the right word,” she suspected that generative AI, with its instantaneous access to every noun and adjective in the English dictionary, could be a helpful tool, especially for topics she struggled to write about.

One of these topics — the topic, really — was the death of Vara’s older sister, who was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer while still in high school. Initially, GPT-3’s attempts at writing a story based on this premise were unsatisfactory. The AI would swap her sister’s real-world fate with a miraculous recovery or, in drafts where her death was acknowledged, turn Vara into a long-distance runner racing for charity. It wasn’t until she shifted to a more collaborative writing process, with GPT-3 learning from and adapting to her own inputs, that it managed to produce a line of text that genuinely touched her:

We were driving home from Clarke Beach, and we were stopped at a red light, and she took my hand and held it. This is the hand she held: the hand I write with, the hand I am writing this with.

Although ChatGPT has been programmed to write in a bland, explanatory way, it can learn to mimic other voices provided it has enough training data.

“I think there is a misconception that large language models like ChatGPT are not very good at writing in a lyrical, literary prose style,” author Sean Michaels tells Big Think after being pointed to Vara’s article. “In fact, they can do it easily and quite well, just like all the image-generating software can do things like making photos in the styles of Wes Anderson or David Lynch.”

For his novel Do You Remember Being Born , in which a poet is approached by a tech company to co-author a collection of poems with their AI, Michaels created a custom version of ChatGPT he called “Moorebot,” which through training learned to write in the style of real-world poet Marianne Moore, further blurring the distinction between human and machine.

AI: creativity and connection

Although some writers oppose the rise of AI out of concern for their employability, others have embedded the debate in an older, broader dialogue on the meaning and purpose of art. The Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who writes in a style so idiosyncratic critics coined the phrase “Kaufmanesque” to describe it, has been perhaps most vocal about his personal distaste of machine learning. Looking beyond the standard definition of creativity — creating something new and original — Kaufman describes art as any form of expression that establishes an emotional connection between people.

“Say who you are,” he said in a BAFTA lecture that foreshadowed comments made during the 2023 SAG strikes . “Really say it, in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there — someone who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be. But if you’re honest, you will help that person be less lonely in their world.”

Even if AI were capable of writing something emotional or profound, which Vara and Michaels claim it can, Kaufman would refuse to recognize this as art because it cannot establish a link between reader and author. “If I read a poem,” he recently said in a statement on AI , “and that poem moves me, I am in love with the person who wrote it. I can’t be in love with a computer program. I can’t, because it isn’t anything.”

Kaufman’s sentiment should be assessed alongside that of Michaels who, through his work with AI, has reached a different conclusion: Human creativity is less special than we want to believe. He explains:

“Imagine I write, ‘The moon looked like a slice of lemon.’ You read it and think, ‘That’s an interesting image.’ But when AI does it, you think, ‘Well, is that interesting? Because it just seems completely random.’ Human beings have this capacity to make meaning from things and find connections where there are none or where there is no intention behind them. I found it provocative not just that AI could come up with lines I found beautiful or strange or interesting, but also that it got me wondering if the AI was doing something successfully as a writer or if I was doing something successfully as a reader.”

As for whether or not AI is capable of ‘true’ creativity:

“It’s true human art draws on memories, bodies, dreams, and arbitrary but somehow meaningful linkages between abstract, surreal thoughts. None of those things are things ChatGPT has. At least not in a literal way. But then again, there is something strange about the way fiction is about pretended bodies, pretended dreams, pretended lived experiences. If you read a modern story about, say, a 17th-century Dutch merchant, that’s not based on anybody’s real-life experience as a 17th-century merchant. Similarly, because these large language models don’t have what we have, that doesn’t mean that their work has none of the qualities that ours does. It’s not that easy.”

The future of writing

According to Michaels, increased usage of large language models is expected to lead “to a certain convergence of styles, with writing becoming less diverse and more monolithic as we use the same algorithms.”

Florent Vinchon, a PhD student at Université Paris Cité studying the creative skills of generative AI, suggests that — although it is still too soon to say with certainty — machine learning “might have the same impact on writing as photography had on painting,” a view shared by other experts in the field. Just as the camera pushed painters from realism to abstraction, spawning artistic movements that concerned themselves with how we perceive rather than what , AI could inspire new generations of authors to experiment with their writing.

Since programs like ChatGPT allow anyone to produce competent prose, the novels and novellas of tomorrow may be deliberately less polished, riddled with grammatical errors and linguistic idiosyncrasies that point to the limits of the human brain and the uniqueness of the individual perspective. Far from a threat to the survival of creative writing or human creativity in general, AI, like the innovative technologies that came before it, may become a force of change and a source of inspiration.