Movements
Realism
Also Known As Literary Realism
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A literary movement, chiefly in the novel, committed to depicting ordinary life and character with close, unsentimental observation rather than Romantic idealization or melodrama. Its major figures span several national traditions with distinct emphases: Flaubert and later Zola in France, George Eliot in England, and, in Russia, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, whose psychological depth is often treated as Realism's furthest development within the movement. Realism's insistence on the texture of everyday, often unglamorous experience marked a deliberate break from Romanticism's emphasis on the exceptional and the sublime.
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Period, From (Year)French literary history commonly dates the movement's emergence to Stendhal and Balzac beginning around 1830, but Realism arrived in different national literatures at markedly different times, English and Russian realism generally reckoned somewhat later, so no single start year holds across the whole movement. Period, To (Year)Realism does not end sharply so much as give way gradually to Naturalism and then Modernism around the turn of the twentieth century, and specific national literatures place that transition at different points, so any single boundary year is a simplification rather than a scholarly consensus. Cross-Tradition Connections
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