Notes on Realism

Some Realist Authors:

Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Emily Dickinson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman

General Notes:

• Reaction against romanticism
• Realism aims at an interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color
• Realism is not concerned with the unusual
• Realism is not concerned with determinism and a completely amoral attitude
• Simple fidelity to actuality in its representation in literature
• Concerned with verisimilitude--the semblance of truth; qualities identified as life-like
• Realism is centered in the novel
• Howells: "the truthful treatment of material"
• Subjects are the common, the average, the everyday
• Realism is the ultimate middle-class art
• Subjects in bourgeois life and manners
• Eschew traditional patterns of the novel
• Protest against falseness and sentimentality
• Central issues of life tend to be ethical--issues of conduct
• Value the individual very highly
• Praise characterization as the center of the novel
• Chief subject matter: surface details, common actions, and the minor catastrophes of a middle-class society
• Tone: comic, satiric; not grim or somber
• Attitude: generally optimistic

(Notes taken from Hart’s The Oxford Companion to American Literature and Holman and Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature)