For a much more extensive description than appears on this brief page, see the works listed in the realism bibliography and the bibliographies on William Dean Howells .
.
Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life. A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism. According to William Harmon and Hugh Holman,
"Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence" (A Handbook to
Literature 428).
Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction between realism and its related late nineteenth-century movement, naturalism . As Donald Pizer notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism:
Howells to London, the term "realism" is difficult to define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can be designated as realism, and that an equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can be designated as naturalism" (5).
Put rather too simplistically, one rough distinction made by critics is that realism espousing a deterministic philosophy and focusing on the lower classes is considered naturalism.
In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells,
Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to this connection, Amy Kaplan has called realism a "strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change" (Social Construction of American Realism ix).

(from Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition)
 Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot
 Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject.
 Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past.
 Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class. (See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel)
 Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances.
 Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.
 Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses.
 Interior or psychological realism a variant form.
 In Black and White Strangers, Kenneth Warren suggests that a basic difference between realism and sentimentalism is that in realism, "the redemption of the individual lay within the social world," but in sentimental fiction, "the redemption of the social world lay with the individual" (75-76).
The realism of James and Twain was critically acclaimed in twentieth century;
Howellsian realism fell into disfavor as part of early twentieth century rebellion against the "genteel tradition."
 Mark Twain
 William Dean Howells
 Rebecca Harding Davis
 John W. DeForest
 Henry James
As editor of the Atlantic Monthly and of Harper's New Monthly Magazine , William
Dean Howells promoted writers of realism as well as those writing local color fiction.
Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia and New York:
Lippincott, 1954): "The basic axiom of the realistic view of morality was that there could be no moralizing in the novel [ . . . ] The morality of the realists, then, was built upon what appears a paradox--morality with an abhorrence of moralizing. Their ethical beliefs called, first of all, for a rejection of scheme of moral behavior imposed, from without, upon the characters of fiction and their actions. Yet Howells always claimed for his works a deep moral purpose. What was it? It was based upon three propositions: that life, social life as lived in the world Howells knew, was valuable, and was permeated with morality; that its

continued health depended upon the use of human reason to overcome the anarchic selfishness of human passions; that an objective portrayal of human life, by art, will illustrate the superior value of social, civilized man, of human reason over animal passion and primitive ignorance" (157).
Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value and true meaning. It would apprehend in all particulars the connection between the familiar and the extraordinary, and the seen and unseen of human nature. Beneath the deceptive cloak of outwardly uneventful days, it detects and endeavors to trace the outlines of the spirits that are hidden there; tho measure the changes in their growth, to watch the symptoms of moral decay or regeneration, to fathom their histories of passionate or intellectual problems. In short, realism reveals. Where we thought nothing worth of notice, it shows everything to be rife with significance.
-- George Parsons Lathrop, 'The Novel and its Future," Atlantic Monthly 34
(September 1874):313 24.
“Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” --William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” Harper's New Monthly
Magazine (November 1889) , p. 966.
Realism, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.
--Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
In its own time, realism was the subject of controversy; debates over the suitability of realism as a mode of representation led to a critical exchange known as the realism war.
(Click here for a brief overview.)
The realism of James and Twain was critically acclaimed in the twentieth century.
Howellsian realism fell into disfavor, however, as part of early twentieth century rebellion against the "genteel tradition." For an account of these and other issues, see the realism bibliography and essays by Pizer, Michael Anesko, Richard
Lehan, and Louis J. Budd, among others, in the Cambridge Guide to Realism and
Naturalism.
In Music and Art

As intellectual and artistic movements 19th-Century Realism and Naturalism are both responses to Romanticism but are not really comparable to it in scope or influence.
For one thing, "realism" is not a term strictly applicable to music. There are verismo
(realistic) operas like Umberto Giordano's
Andrea Chénier created in the last decade of the 19th century in Italy, but it is their plots rather than their music which can be said to participate in the movement toward realism. Since "pure" untexted music is not usually representational (with the controversial exception of "program" music), it cannot be said to be more or less realistic.
In contrast, art may be said to have had many realistic aspects before this time. The still lifes and domestic art of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
1
(1699-1779) anticipate many of the concerns of the 19th-Century Realists, and he in turn owes a debt to the Netherland school of still-life painting of the century before him, and one can find similar detailed renderings of everyday objects even on the walls of 1st-century Pompeii. Realism is a recurrent theme in art which becomes a coherent movement only after 1850; and even then it struggles against the overwhelming popularity of Romanticism.
In mid-19th century France, Gustave Courbet
2
set forth a program of realistic painting as a self-conscious alternative to the dominant Romantic style, building on earlier work by the painters of the Barbizon School (of which the most famous member was Jean-
François Millet), which had attempted to reproduce landscapes and village life as directly and accurately as possible. Impressionism can be seen as a development which grew out of Realism, but in its turn still had to battle the more popular Romanticism. Realism has never entirely displaced the popular taste for Romantic art, as any number of hotel-room paintings, paperback book covers and calendars testify. It became just one more style among others.
In Fiction
Realism's most important influences have been on fiction and the theater. It is perhaps unsurprising that its origins can be traced to France, where the dominant official neoclassicism had put up a long struggle against Romanticism. Since the 18th century the
French have traditionally viewed themselves as rationalists, and this prevailing attitude in intellectual circles meant that Romanticism led an uneasy existence in France even when allied with the major revolutionary movements of 1789 and 1830.
Balzac
Novelist Honoré de Balzac 3
is generally hailed as the grandfather of literary Realism in the long series of novels and stories he titled La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), and which attempted systematically to render a portrait of all aspects of the France of his time from the lowest thief or prostitute to the highest aristocrat or political leader. The title of the series was chosen to contrast with Dante's Divine Comedy, which had portrayed everything except the earthly human realm.

His attention to detail was obsessive, with long passages of description of settings being a characteristic feature of his work. Today readers resist such descriptive writing, but before films and television were invented, it had a magical effect on people, causing the world depicted to explode from the page in an almost tangible fashion. It is important to remember in reading all 19th-century fiction that those people who had the time and inclination to read novels at all generally had a lot of time to kill, and none of the cinematic and electronic distractions which have largely replaced recreational reading in our time. They welcomed lengthy novels (often published serially, over a series of weeks or even months) in the same way we greet a satisfying television series which becomes a staple of our lives.
Like such a television series, his works also incorporated a device for maintaining his audience: the continual reappearance of certain characters from one work to the next-now as protagonists, now as secondary figures. The idea is an old one, going back classic bodies of work such as the Homeric epics and the Medieval Arthurian romances; but it had a different effect in Balzac's work: readers could recognize a slightly altered version of the world they themselves inhabited as they moved from story to story.
What is not realistic about Balzac's fiction is his plots, filled with sensational conspiracies and crimes and wildly improbable coincidences. Balzac's works are still essentially
Romantic creations with a Realistic veneer.
Gustave Flaubert
It was Gustave Flaubert who in 1857 produced the seminal work from which later literary
Realism was to flow: Madame Bovary.
4
Flaubert had begun his writing career as most young authors in his time did, as a Romantic, laboring on a tale of Medieval mysticism which was eventually published as La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of
Saint Anthony). When he read an early draft of this work to some friends, they urged him to attempt something more down to earth. He chose the story of an adulterous woman married to an unimaginative country physician unable to respond to--or even comprehend--her romantic longings. Drawing on the real-life stories of two women--
Delphine Delamare and Louise Pradier--whose experiences he was intimately familiar with, Flaubert labored to turn journalism into art while avoiding the romantic clichés he associated with his heroine's fevered imagination.
Like Balzac, he engaged in systematic research, modeling the village in his novel on an actual country town and even drawing a map of it detailed enough to allow scholars to catch him when he has Emma Bovary turn in the wrong direction on one of her walks.
Unlike Balzac, he avoided the sensational sort of plot lines characteristic of Romantic novels. To modern readers a married woman carrying on two adulterous affairs and then committing suicide may seem fairly sensational, but it is important to note that there was a long tradition of tales of female adultery in French literature stretching back as far as the Middle Ages. What Flaubert did with the theme was give adultery the shocking impact of the tabloids by stripping his tale of the high romantic idealism that usually

justified adultery; instead he systematically satirized his heroine's bourgeois taste for exotic art and sensational stories. The novel is almost an anti-romantic tract.
Despite the fact that it is generally agreed to be one of the most finely crafted works to be created in the 19th century, it would probably never have had the impact it did if Madame
Bovary had not also been the subject of a sensational obscenity trial. So restrained were the standards of polite fiction in mid-19th-century France that many modern readers go right past the big "sex scenes" which got Flaubert into trouble without noticing them
(hints: look for Rodolphe to smoke while working on his harness just after making love with Emma for the first time while she experiences the afterglow, and for Emma to toss torn-up pieces of a note out of her carriage during her lovemaking with Léon). However, they were enough to outrage the defenders of middle-class morality. The prosecution was particularly indignant that Emma did not seem to suffer for her sins. Flaubert's clever lawyer successfully argued that her grotesquely described death made the novel into a moral tale; but the fact is that she dies not because she is an adultress but because she is a shopaholic.
It is not only the literary style of Madame Bovary that is anti-Romantic, it is its subject as well. The narrative clearly portrays Emma as deluded for trying to model her life after the
Romantic fiction she loves. The novel is a sort of anti-Romantic manifesto, and its notoriety spread its message far and wide. It is worth noting, however, that Flaubert returned to Romanticism from time to time in his career, for instance in Salammbo, a colorful historical novel set in ancient Carthage.
Influence of Realism
Realism had profound effects on fiction from places as far-flung as Russia and the
Americas. The novel, which had been born out of the romance as a more or less fantastic narrative, settled into a realistic mode which is still dominant today. Aside from genre fiction such as fantasy and horror, we expect the ordinary novel today to be based in our own world, with recognizably familiar types of characters endowed with no supernatural powers, doing the sorts of things that ordinary people do every day. It is easy to forget that this expectation is only a century and a half old, and that the great bulk of the world's fiction before departed in a wide variety of ways from this standard, which has been applied to film and television as well. Even comic strips now usually reflect daily life.
Repeated revolts against this standard by various postmodernist and magical realist varieties of fiction have not dislodged the dominance of realism in fiction.
Naturalism
The emergence of Naturalism does not mark a radical break with Realism, rather the new style is a logical extension of the old. The term was invented by Émile Zola partly because he was seeking for a striking platform from which to convince the reading public that it was getting something new and modern in his fiction. In fact, he inherited a good deal from his predecessors. Like Balzac and Flaubert, he created detailed settings

meticulously researched, but tended to integrate them better into his narrative, avoiding the long set-piece descriptions so characteristic of earlier fiction. Again, like Balzac, he created a series of novels with linked characters and settings ( "Les Rougon-Macquart:
Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second Empire" --"The Rougon-
Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family During the Second Empire") which stretched to twenty novels. He tried to create a portrait of France in the 1880s to parallel the portrait Balzac had made of his own times in the Comédie humaine . Like Flaubert, he focussed on ordinary people with often debased motives.
He argued that his special contribution to the art of fiction was the application to the creation of characters and plot of the scientific method. The new "scientific novel" would be created by placing characters with known inherited characteristics into a carefully defined environment and observing the resulting behavior. No novelist can actually work like this, of course, since both characters and setting are created in the distinctly unobjective mind of the writer; but Zola's novels do place special stress on the importance of heredity and environment in determining character. They are anti-
Romantic in their rejection of the self-defining hero who transcends his background.
History shapes his protagonists rather than being shaped by them. This leads to an overwhelming sense of doom in most of his novels, culminating in a final catastrophe.
Zola further tends to create his principal characters as representative types rather than striking individuals. He also places great emphasis on people acting in groups, and is one of the few great writers of mob scenes. Humanity in the mass is one of his chief subjects, and his individuals are selected to illustrate aspects of society.
Zola can be said to have created in Germinal the disaster narrative exemplified in the
20th century by Arthur Hailey's novels ( Airport ) and movies like The Towering Inferno and Titanic.
The formula is a classic one: assemble a varied group of representative characters together in some institution or space and subject them to a catastrophe and watch how they individually cope with it.
Zola also took frankness about sexual functions much further than the early Realists had dared; and it is this, combined with a pervasive pessimism about humanity, which chiefly characterizes the Naturalist novel.
Unlike Flaubert, Zola was not a meticulous craftsman of beautiful prose. At times it seems as if he is writing with a meat ax; but he undeniably infused French fiction with a refreshing vigor, giving it a tough, powerful edge far removed from the vaporings of high romanticism.
If Zola often startled the French with his frankness, he shocked readers in other lands, where his works were often banned, regarded as little more than pornography (an assessment which is quite unfair, but unsurprising given the temper of the times).

Zola has had an enormous impact on the American novel. Americans with their preference for action over thought and for gritty realism were strongly drawn to his style of writing. Early 20th-century writers like Theodore Dreiser applied his approaches to
American themes successfully, and Frank Norris practically stole large chunks of Zola's novels in some of his own works. The mainstream American novel is preponderantly naturalistic, and gives rise to another genre which still lives on: the hard-boiled detective story.
For all these reasons, Zola strikes us as far more "modern" than Balzac, or even Flaubert.
It can be argued that the "default" style of modern narrative is Realist, with the various forms of fantastic narratives which dominated the writing of earlier ages relegated to the margins; and even fantasy is often judged as to its plausibility. Without altogether banishing Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism have had considerable success.
By Patricia Penrose
In most people's minds, the years following the Civil War symbolized a time of healing and rebuilding. For those engaged in serious literary circles, however, that period was full of upheaval. A literary civil war raged on between the camps of the romantics and the realists and later, the naturalists . People waged verbal battles over the ways that fictional characters were presented in relation to their external world.
Using plot and character development, a writer stated his or her philosophy about how much control mankind had over his own destiny. For example, romantic writers such as Ralph Waldo
Emerson celebrated the ability of human will to triumph over adversity. On the other hand, Mark
Twain, William Dean Howells and Henry James were influenced by the works of early
European Realists, namely Balzac's La Comedie Humaine (begun in the 1830s); Turgenev's
Sportsman's Sketches (1852); and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856).
These American realists believed that humanity's freedom of choice was limited by the power of outside forces. At another extreme were naturalists Stephen Crane and Frank Norris who supported the ideas of Emile Zola and the determinism movement. Naturalists argued that individuals have no choice because a person's life is dictated by heredity and the external environment. In summary, here's how the genres portrayed their characters:
Genre American Author Perceived the individual as...
a god simply a person
Romantics Ralph Waldo Emerson
Realists Henry James
William Dean Howells
Mark Twain
Naturalists Stephen Crane
Frank Norris
(Harper , 1153) a helpless object

Emergence of American Realism
The industrial revolution that took place at the end of the 19 th century changed our country in remarkable ways. People left rural homes for opportunities in urban cities. With the development of new machinery and equipment, the U.S. economy became more focused on factory production; Americans did not have to chiefly rely on farming and agriculture to support their families. At the same time, immigrants from all over the world crowded into tenements to take advantage of new urban opportunities. In the end, the sweeping economic, social, and political changes that took place in post-war life allowed American Realism to prevail.
The realism of the 1880s featured the works of Twain, Howells and James among other writers.
American Realists concentrated their writing on select groups or subjects. Examples of this practice include: o The factory workers of Upton Sinclair and Rebecca Harding David o
Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt's stories of black life o
Kate Chopin's views of marriage and women's roles
The writing during this period was also very regional. The industrial revolution called for standardization, mass production of goods and streamlined channels of distribution. America was leaping into a new modern age and people feared that local folkways and traditions would be soon forgotten. Responding to these sentiments, realistic writers set their stories in specific
American regions, rushing to capture the "local color" before it was lost. They drew upon the sometimes grim realities of everyday life, showing the breakdown of traditional values and the growing plight of the new urban poor. American realists built their plots and characters around people's ordinary, everyday lives. Additionally, their works contained regional dialects and extensive dialogue which connected well with the public. As a result, readers were attracted to the realists because they saw their own struggles in print. Conversely, the public had little patience for the slow paced narratives, allegory and symbolism of the romantic writers. America was shifting into higher gear and readers wanted writers who clearly communicated the complexities of their human experiences.
Spurring Change
At its basic level, realism was grounded in the faithful reporting of all facets of everyday
American life. According to William Dean Howells, "Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material" (Carter, 36). The reading public's preference for realism parallels the changes that were occurring at the end of the 19th and into the 20th century. For example, the modern scientific revolution advocated that truth and knowledge be based on empirical data. Reinforcing that notion, the industrial revolution proclaimed that a better civil society could be built upon machinery and factory labor. Given this atmosphere, several developments occurred around the same time: (1)The growth of investigative journalism; (2) the rise of muckrakers ; and (3) the establishment of a new-found fascination with the camera as a means of capturing the realities of a single instant, unvarnished by sentimentality.

In many ways, these turn of the century developments are still alive and well. With regard to contemporary literature, realism is so pervasive that it seems natural and unimportant. However, upon close examination, we realize that realism planted the seeds for many of America's core values.
Basic Tenets
As with all literary genres, we cannot rely on generalizations to interpret a work. After all, realistic literature reflected more than mere external reality. According to Richard Chase's The
American Novel and Its Tradition, realism has specific social, political, and artistic characteristics that set it apart from other genres. Below are the salient points that Chase makes about realism:
Plot and Character

Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject.

Characters appear in the real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past.

Humans control their destinies; characters act on their environment rather than simply reacting to it.

Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot.

Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances.

Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class.
Interpretation and Analysis

Realism is viewed as a realization of democracy.

The morality of Realism is intrinsic, integral, relativistic – relations between people and society are explored.

Realists were pragmatic, relativistic, democratic and experimental. The purpose of writing is to instruct and to entertain.
Structure of Prose

Diction is the natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.

The use of symbolism is controlled and limited; the realists depend more on the use of images.

Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses.
Other Important Aspects

Interior or psychological realism is a variant form.

Realism of James and Twain critically acclaimed in the twentieth century; Howellsian

realism fell into disfavor as part of an early twentieth century rebellion against the
"genteel tradition."
Works Cited
Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age of Realism . Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1954.
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957
"The Literature of an Expanding Nation." The Harper American Literature. Donald
McQuade, editor. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
Definitions
Determinism is the philosophical belief that events are shaped by forces beyond the control of human beings. Scientific Determinism , important to literature at the end of the nineteenth century (see Naturalism), assigns control especially to heredity and environment, without seeking their origins further than science can trace. (The Harper Handbook of Literature)
Muckrakers were American journalists and novelists of the first decade of the twentieth century who exposed corruption in big business and government. Theodore Roosevelt invented the term in a 1906 speech, agreeing with some of the muckrakers' findings but deploring the methods as irresponsible sensationalism. He alluded to the "man with a Muck-rake" in John
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), who could look only downward as he stirred the filth, unable to see the heavenly crown held above him. Mass circulation magazines such as The
Arena, Colliers, Cosmopolitan, Everybody's, The Independent, and McClures financed the investigations and published the work of muckrakers Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, David
Graham Phillips, Ray Stannard Baker, T.W. Lawson, Mark Sullivan, and Samuel Hopkins
Adams. Examples of muckraking novels include: Phillips' Great God Success (1901); Upton
Sinclair's Jungle (1901); and the later books of the American Winston Churchill. (The Harper
Handbook of Literature)
Naturalism was a literary movement of the late nineteenth century that yielded influence on the twentieth. It was an extension of realism, a reaction against the restrictions inherent in the realistic emphasis on the ordinary, as naturalists insisted that the extraordinary is real, too. In place of the middle-class realities of a George Eliot, or a William Dean Howells, the naturalists wrote about the fringes of society, the criminal, the fallen, the down-and-out, earning as one definition of their work the phrase sordid realism . Naturalism came largely from scientific
Determinism. Darwinism was especially important to the genre, as the naturalists perceived a person's fate as the product of blind external or biological forces (chiefly heredity and environment). But in the typical naturalistic novel, change played a large part as well. (The
Harper Handbook of Literature)
Romanticism was a movement in literature that celebrated the individual. Romantics believed in humankind's innate goodness and eventual perfectibility. The genre accepted experimentation

as an expression of an artist's individuality. For example, Romantic literature discarded the formality of the closed heroic couplet and embraced a lyrical openness of style. In essence, the
Romantic view was egalitarian. Equal at birth, inherently good, valued as individuals, all people were encouraged toward self-development. Romanticism stressed the value of expressing human abilities that were common to all from birth rather than from training. Thus, emotional, intuitive, and sensual elements of artistic, religious, and intellectual expression were counted in some ways more valid than the products of education and reason. Romanticism embraced nature as a model for harmony in society and art. Jean Jacques Rousseau is considered the father of romanticism. His noble savage characterized an idealized vision of humanity freed from the stifling boundaries of civilization. (The Harper Handbook of Literature)
Realism is, in the broadest sense, simply fidelity to actuality in its representation in literature...... In order to give it more precise definition, however, one needs to limit it to the movement which arose in the nineteenth century, at least partially in reaction against
Romanticism, which was centered in the novel, and which was dominant in France,
England, and America from roughly mid-century to the closing decade, when it was replaced by Naturalism. In this latter scene, realism defines a literary method, a philosophical and political attitude, and a particular kind of subject matter.
Realism has been defined as "the truthful treatment of material" by one of its most vigorous advocates, William Dean Howells, but the statement means little until the realists' concept of truth and their selection of materials are designated. Generally, realists are believers in Pragmatism, and the truth they seek to find and express is a relativistic truth, associated with discernible consequences and verifiable by experience. Generally, too, realists are believers in democracy, and the materials they elect to describe are the common, the average, the everyday. Furthermore, realism can be thought of as the ultimate of middle-class art, and it finds its subjects in bourgeois life and manners. Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual to find the scientific laws which control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence.
Realists espouse what is essentially a Mimetice Theory of Art, centering their attention in the thing imitated and asking for something close to a one-to-one correspondence between the representation and the subject. They usually have, however, a powerful interest in the audience to whom their work is addressed, feeling it to be their obligation to deal with it with absolute truthfulness. Furthermore, realists are unusually interested in the effect their work has on the audience and its life(in this respect they tend toward a
Pragmatic theory of art); George Eliot, in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede(a classic statement of the intention of the realist), expresses her desire that her pictures of common life and average experience should knit more tightly the bonds of human sympathy among her readers. Howells, concerned with his audience of young ladies, felt so strongly the

obligation not to do them moral injury that he shut the doors of his own works to most of the aspects of life connected with passion and sex.
Realists eschew the traditional patterns of the novel. In part the rise of realism came as a protest against the falseness and sentimentality which realists thought they saw in romantic fiction. Life, they felt, lacked symmetry and plot; fiction which truthfully reflected life should, therefore, avoid symmetry and plot. Simple, clear, direct prose was the desirable vehicle, and objectivity on the part of the novelist the proper attitude. The central issues of life tend to be ethical -- that is, issues of conduct. Fiction should, therefore, concern itself with such issues, and -- since selection is a necessary part of any art -- select with a view to presenting these issues accurately as they affect men and women in actual situations. Furthermore, the democratic attitudes of realists tended to make them value the individual very highly and to praise characterization as the center of the novel. Hence, they had a great concern for the effect of action upon character, and a tendency to explore the psychology of the actors in their stories. In Henry James, perhaps the greatest of the realists, this tendency to explore the inner selves of characters confronted with complex ethical choices earned for him not only the title of "father of the psychological novel" but also the title of "biographer of fine consciences."
The surface details, the common actions, and the minor catastrophes of a middle-class society constituted the chief subject matter of the movement. Most of the realists avoided situations with tragic or catacylsmic implications. Their tone was often comic, frequently satiric, seldom grim or somber. Their general attitude was broadly optimistic, although
James is a great exception.
Although aspects of realism appeared almost with the beginnings of the English novel, for they are certainly present in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Jane Austen,
Trollope, Thackeray, and Dickens, the realistic movement found its effective origins in
France with Balzac, in England with George Eliot, and in America with Howells and
Mark Twain. Writers like Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells in
England, and Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Sinclair Lewis, John O'Hara,
John P. Marquand, and Louis Auchincloss in America kept and are keeping the realistic traditon alive in the contemporary novel.
The Civil War had been, at least in part, a struggle between the concept of agrarian democracy and that of industrial and capitalistic democracy, and the result of the
Northern victory was the triumphant emergence of industrialism. The industrialism was to bring great mechanical and material advances for the nation, but it was also to bring great difficulties in the form of severe labor disputes, economic depression, and strikes that erupted in violence; its capitalistic aspect was to produce a group of powerful and ruthless moneyed men who have gone down in history as the "robber barons"; its application to politics, particularly in the rapidly developing great cities, was to produce

"bossism" and a form of political corruption known by Lincoln Steffens' phrase, "the shame of cities." The impact of invention and industrial development was tremendous.
The greatest advances were made in communications: the Atlantic cable was laid in
1866; transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869; the telephone was invented in
1876; and the automobile with the inter-combustion engine was being manufactured by the 1890's. By the last two decades of the century many thoughtful people had begun to march under various banners declaring that somewhere and somehow the promise of the
American dream had been lost--they often said "betrayed"--and that drastic changes needed to be made in order to recapture it. The Populist Party, the Grange, Henry
George's "single tax," and the socialism of the American intellectual were all reflections of a disillusionment with American life never before widespread int the nation.
Intellectually, too, average Americans were living in a new world, although they did not always realize it. The impact of Darwin, Marx, Comte, Spencer, and others advancing a scientific view of human beings sharply at variance with the older religious view was cutting from beneath thoughtful Americans--even while they vehemently denied it-- their old certainty about their perfectibility and about the inevitability of progress. The passing by 1890 of the physical frontier removed from their society a natural safety valve that had acted to protect them against the malcontents and the restless in their world; now they must absorb them and adjust to the fact of their presence; no longer could they seek virgin land on which to build their notions of a world. The rapid growth of education and the rise of the mass-circulation magazine, playing its way by advertising, created a mass audience for authors, and the passage in 1891 of the International Copyright Act protected foreign authors from piracy in America and by the same token protected the native literary product from being undercut by pirated editions of foreign works.
In poetry,.three new and authentic poetic voices were raised in the period: Walt
Whitman's in his democratic chant cast in experimental rhythmic poetry; Sidney Lanier's in his moral statements couched in experimental musical poetry; and Emily Dickinson's in her gnomic utterances cast in witty variations on traditional forms. Toward the close of the century Stephen Crane raised a haunting but strident voice in sparse experimental verse that was close to that of the imagists of the twentieth century.
In fiction, the new turbulence, the growing skepticism and disillusionment found an effective voice. The developing mass audience was served by local-color writing, which filled the popular magazines, and by the historical novel, which had a great upsurge of popularity as the century drew toward a close. But in the work of Mark Twain, of
William Dean Howells, and of Henry James, the greatest contributions of the age were made. In the works of these men and of lesser writers--largely from the Middle West-realism was formulated as a literary doctrine and practiced as an art form which came to dominate the American literary scene. William James's pragmatism not only expressed the mood of the Realistic Period but also shaped its literary expression, an expression that became increasingly critical of American life as the century drew toward its end.

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Realism is the term applied to literary composition that aims at an interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. It is opposed to the concern with the unusual which forms the basis of romance, but it does not proceed, as does naturalism, to the philosophy of determinism and a completely amoral attitude.
The new concepts of science which included the idea of evolution as progress, the view of nature as ruthless struggle for survival, the philosophy of scientific materialism, and a mechanistic interpretation of life all contributed to a changed understanding of the meaning of life. It affected the form of American writing, particularly that of the novel.
The industrial revolution, with its factory system, the growth of cities, quick wealth, keen competition, increased immigration, and shifting of social classes gave a whole new body of material for the writers to report and interpret.
Realism is a quality of all literature, and a realistic period is simply one where realism is predominant. So in this period, it was an extension and continuation of romanticism, not a wholly different attitude toward life. Its emphasis was on character rather than plot, on the commonplace rather than on the unusual, on the truthful treatment of material rather than on hopeful and idealistic fictions.
The most significant literary movement between the Civil War and World War I was realism. Literary realism was the natural development of an age forced to acknowledge a number of new realities. It was an outgrowth of a people less ready to accept the old optimism and affirmations of the prewar transcendentalists, a people who, in the scientific and perhaps skeptical spirit of the day, were ready to accept only what could be observed and verified with the senses. The major spokesman for literary realism was
William Dean Howells, whose influence as a novelist, editor, and critic was powerful.
Other major writers who are usually considered realists were Mark Twain and Henry
James, although their realism often differs from that of Howells, and even more significantly from each other. Howells had many disciples, including Stephen Crane and
Hamlin Garland, two writers who are also considered forerunners of literary naturalism.
Although many critics see the naturalistic movement which began in the 1890's as an outgrowth and extension of realism, others consider it, at least in part, a reaction against realism and, therefore, the start of a decline of realism as a movement. The local color movement which followed the war and frontier humor tales are often considered contributing factors to American realism.

Undoubtedly the dominant phenomenon in nineteenth-century European literature was the emergence of REALISM. From a literary point of view the triumph of the novel, in which it found its most apt expression. In its social aspect realism was a manifestation of the faith in science and liberalism which grew constantly during the century and only began to falter toward 1900. In content realistic literature is generally concerned with the affairs of the middle and lower classes; it treats economic, social, and technical matters(e.g., agriculture and industry) in addition to the traditional literary themes of love and gallantry, and it purports to utilize the vernacular of daily life instead of the artificial poetic diction of previous literatures.
The dominant realistic movement which began with Howells, James, and Edith Wharton continued to hold sway over American letters after the First World War. Where the main body of European novelists had turned to realism in the nineteenth century and then reacted against it in the twentieth century, the Americans, following their example a generation behind them, arrived at the peak of their realistic movement around 1914.
Meanwhile an even more important literary tendency began to develop out of the realistic movement: the school of naturalism, which dominated American letters during the important era of the Twenties.
How is the naturalism different from nineteenth century realism? First it differs in subject matter. It took as subjects ugly and unpleasant stories and people. Second, it threw out anything peculiarly human or religious, denying that man had any moral freedom of choice and asserting that his whole life was determined by heredity and environment. Often it is completely pessimistic, taking the gloomiest view of life.
Main qualities of naturalism as a literary movement are as follows:
(a) Naturalism is scientific or pseudo-scientific in its approach; it attempts to treat human beings as biological pawns rather than as agents of free will. The author does not attempt to judge his characters or to comment on their actions; he merely inserts them into a crucial situation and then pretends to stand back and watch them with the impassivity of the scientist.
(b) The naturalist attempts to make literature into a document of society. He writes
"novel cycles" purporting to cover every aspect of modern life, or creates characters who are personifications of various social classes. Many naturalists gather copious data from actual life and include it in their literary works; they write novels around specific occupations such as railroading or textile manufacturing in which they utilize technical details of the trade for story interest. This aspect of naturalism represents an attempt to remove literature from the realm of the fine arts into the field of the social sciences.
(c) Because of the above-described documentary nature of naturalism, the technique often involves the conscious suppression of the poetic elements in literature. The prose style is flat, objective, and bare of imagery; it includes copious details and explanations, and is

wary of highly literary metaphors. It endeavors to imitate scientific, technical, or sociological writing rather than the belles-letters of the past, and in doing so ignores the great part of what is ordinarily considered literary beauty.
(d) Naturalistic literature tends to be concerned with the less elegant aspects of life; its typical settings are the slum, the sweatshop, the factory, or the farm. Where the romantic author selects the most pleasant and idealistic elements in his experience, the naturalistic author often seems positively drawn toward the brutal, the sordid, the cruel, and the degraded. This tendency is in part a reaction against earlier literature, especially the sentimentalism of the romantics. The real motivation forces in a naturalistic novel are not religion, hope, or human idealism; they are the basic urges of self-preservation, sex, and ambition.
(e) Naturalism is sometimes, but not always, socialistic or radical in politics. The sympathy of the typical naturalist lies with the proletariat, and he sees social evolution mainly in terms of the conflict of classes. Industrial strife plays a large part in naturalistic literature, as does description of the exploitation of the worker, male and female, by the boss.