Though Realism is usually invoked as the antithesis to its 'nemesis,' Romanticism, it can also be understood more as an aesthetic sensibility: the artist's painstaking care in the creation of a lifelike illusion of reality. The detailed description of sensual effects... [more]

Though Realism is usually invoked as the antithesis to its 'nemesis,' Romanticism, it can also be understood more as an aesthetic sensibility: the artist's painstaking care in the creation of a lifelike illusion of reality. The detailed description of sensual effects takes up the bulk of the Realist's bag of technical tricks. Realist works concentrate on the semblance of life in their focus on the observable and telling detail; they avoid the improbable, the idealized, or the glamorous. Earlier English writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding had experimented with unvarnished, 'slice of life' narratives, but the movement really gelled in the industrialized ambiance of nineteenth-century Europe. Like literary Giopettos, Realist authors strove to bring the squalor and hardscrabble nature of the urban jungle to life. Consciously Realist novels like Honore Balzac's 'Lost Illusions' (1837-43), Gustave Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary' (1857), and George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' (1871-2) focused on the petty, often painful problems of regular folks. Realism didn't cross the ocean until the 1880s, when American authors Henry James and Stephen Crane attempted to evoke recognizable situations without moralizing or pontificating. Realism lent credence and objective muscle to the related movement of Naturalism, which overturned at the turn of the century. It is now such a pervasive, inextricable literary element that it is rarely classified as a distinctive movement. [show less]