REALISM
Realism refers to the subject - matter of as well as the technique by which a literary work has been created . In theory, the realist wishing to record life as it is refrains from imposing a predetermined pattern ( based perhaps on a philosophic orientation ) upon his materials.
He always the story " To tell itself ", for truth, he feels resides in the events themselves rather than in his imagination. Free of Romantic subjectivity, realistic writing emphasizes the truthfulness of detail. This " theory " of realism, however, is not to be taken without reservations, for any artist must shape the materials of his art into a form which derives from his personal vision.
Nor does the adoption of an essentially realistic approach limit a writer's access to other techniques . Ibsen , for example , who is rightly considered the founder of the modern realistic drama , is ' in such plays as ghosts The Wild Duck and The Master Builder a profoundly symbolic writet . As a technique , realism may logically handle any subject matter , but it has chiefly been concerned with the common places of everyday life and the middle and lower social classes .
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| What is the realism concept? |
The American novelist and critic William ' Dean Howells conceived of realism as for depicting simple , everyday people with " Work - worn , brave , kindly faces , " but other realists have strenuously avoided such material in favour of more earthy narratives . From the beginning of the " realistic movement " , which dates from the mid - nineteenth century , these has been no universally accepted set of principles governing the manner or content of so - called realistic works .
In French literature , the realism in the fiction of Flaubert , Balzac and Maupassant is as different as it is in such American authors as Sherwood Anderson and John Steinbeck . As a term , realism is not of course , limited to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries , for elements may be found in such earlier works as Defoe's Moll Flanders and Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair . Generally however , " realistic " handling in past works refers to the accuracy of speech and behaviour with which a writer has endowed his " low " characters.
In recent years , realists have turned from their concern with accuracy of external detail to the complex workings of the mind . Service of the " Stream of consciousness " with its fidelity to the inner psychological processes of characters , has become part of much modern fiction . Such writers as Virginia Wolf and James Joyce, though not strictly speaking writers of realistic novels , have reported the flow of consciousness of their characters with such faithfulness that some critics have attacked their psychological realism as lacking in artistic selection .
Thus the history of the novel is so intimately bound up with the issue of realism that we can hardly talk about the novel without addressing it . Moreover, that there is a family of new characteristic to be found in much modern art and literature can scarcely be disputed and the term modernism allows us to isolate these characteristics and to distinguish between radically different lines of development in the art and literature of the present century.
Finally, although theories of the post-modern have come into prominence only during the last decade or so , they are so central to discussion not just of recent experimental fiction but also of many much older works that they need to be considered. We saw that the novel is distignuished by what we can call is formal realism.
It is stocked with people and places that eem real even if they are imagined where as genres such as the romance of the epic were peopled with people and places hat seem ( and were meant to seem ) unreal in important ways . We can note , furthermore that realism is a term which a large umber of novelists have felt the need to use in connction with iscussion of the novel .
On a simple level it can be said that something - a haracter , an event , a setting is realistic if it resembles a model in everyday life . The matter becomes more complex , owever , when we remember that a novelist can make us think seriously and critically about the real world by creating characters , events and settings that in many ways diverge from what we would expect in everyday life - in reality.
Think how many unusual coincidences and extraordinary events there are in those novels which are normally described as highly realistic ; George Eliot's Middlemarch ( 1871 ) for example. Think too of parody and satire , both of which can be used to important effect by the novelist. A parody is often very unrealistic in one sense, depending upon such extremes of exaggeration and such pointed selection that it cannot be said to give us anything that can be compared to our everyday world in terms of direct, one to one resemblance .
But parodies and satires clearly do cause us to see our everyday world very differently . The paradox , then is that sometimes that which distorts what the real world is like , actually leads us to see the real world more accurately . One of the most influential debates about the nature of realism in the present century involved a critic very much associated with the novel - George Luckacs, for Lucacs, who saw realism as the conteporary artist's necessary, even ultimate aim , the artist was required to portray the totality of reality at any given point in history, to penetrate between surface appearances, and to reveal processes of change.
He believed that the artist's task was similar to that set for himself by Mar to understand world history as a complex and dynamic In practice this led Lukacs to place a supreme valve upon totality through the uncovering of certain understanding laws . certain works of a classical realism in the novel - the name Tolstoy, Balzac and Thomas Mann are frequently on his lips or at the tip of his pen and to wage an unceasing campaign against different aspects of what we classified as modernism.
At the end of his, The Historical Novel ( 1936-37 ) Lucas referred to the misunderstanding of his position that we intended a formal revival, an artistic imitation of the classical historical novel, but even so many commentators have seen his opposition to modernism to be so all-embracing that this is actually what would have been required in order to satisfy his requirement that a literary work is realistic Lukacs's views are important for us to know about, because whatever his intention ( and this is still a matter for debate ) his arguments tended to encourage a view of the classic realist novel of the nineteenth century as the pinnacle of artistic achievement of the novel, from which point on a decline took place as novelists abandoned that which the of them.
As this shift from realism to modernism coincides with genre demanded the serious novels loss of its unambiguously popular status, the common Reader has been dragged into discussions about the proper role and form from the novel.
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- Plot construction of 'She Stoops to Conquer'
- English Comedy before Goldsmith
- Sentimental Comedy: Reaction of Goldsmith against it
- Character and role of Miss Neville
- Discuss She Stoops to Conquer as a Sentimental Comedy
- Discuss Goldsmith's View of Sentimental Comedy
- Give an estimate of Goldsmith as a dramatist
- Contribution of Goldsmith as a Dramatist
