Realism is applied by literary critics in two diverse ways:
1) to identify a movement in the writing of novels during the 19th century that included Balzac in France, George Eliot in England and William Dean Howells in America.
2) to designate a recurrent mode, in various eras and literary forms, of representing human life and experience in literature. Features of Realism
Realistic fiction is often opposed to romantic fiction.
Realistic fiction is written to give the effect that it represents life and the social world as it seems to the common reader, evoking the sense that its characters might in fact exist, and that such thing might well happen.
To achieve this, realists may or may not be selective in subject matter, but render their materials in ways that make them seem the very stuff of ordinary experience. American Realism
to portray American life as it really was
The realists had what Henry James called “a powerful impulse to mirror the unmitigated realities of life.”
originated in France, called for “reality and truth” first appeared in the literature of local color.
“Nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”
The international theme
the meeting of America and Europe, American innocence in contact and contrast with European decadence, and it moral and psychological complications
Local Colorism
the late 1860s and early seventies the 1880s
the turn of the century
Fiction or verse which emphasizes its setting, being concerned with the character of a district or of an era, as marked by its customs, landscape, costumes, dialect, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influences. Naturalism
A new and harsher realism, an outgrowth of 19th century scientific thought, and stems from French literature.
naturalists attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were dominated by their environment and heredity. Naturalist beliefs
Men devoid of the freedom of choice are incapable of shaping their own
destinies;
Men are helpless and insignificant in a cold and indifferent world; Men’s lack of dignity in face of environment and heredity American Naturalism
it had been shaped by the war, by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Charles Darwin.
American naturalist writers: Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Henry Adams, Theodore Dreiser
The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded their works.
Imagism
Imagism was a poetic vogue that flourished in England and even more vigorously in America, between the years 1912 and 1917.
The imagist proposals were for a poetry which, abandoning conventional poetic materials and versification, is free to choose any subject and to create its own rhythms, uses common speech, and presents an image or vivid sensory description that is hard, clear, and concentrated Modern Literature (1914-1939)
The era between the two world wars, marked also by the trauma of the great economic depression beginning in 1929, was that of the emergence of Modern Literature. This period has been marked by persistent and multi-dimensioned experiments in subject matter and form, and has produced major achievements in all the literary genres. . Features
most critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with the traditional bases both of Western culture and of Western art. Important intellectual precursors of modernism, in this sense, are thinkers who questioned the certainties that had hitherto provided a support to social organization, religion, morality, and the conception of the human self Avant-garde
A prominent feature of modernism
By violating accepted conventions and decorum; they undertake to create ever-new artistic forms and styles and to introduce hitherto neglected, and often forbidden, subject matters. Frequently avant-garde artists represent themselves as \"alienated\" from the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy; their aim is to shock the sensibilities of the conventional reader and to challenge the norms and pieties of bourgeois culture.
The Iceberg Theory
Hemingway’s aesthetic theory which stated that omitting the right thing
from a story could actually strengthen it. Hemingway equated this theory with the structure of an iceberg where only 1/8 of the iceberg could be seen above water while the remaining 7/8 under the surface provided the iceberg’s dignity of motion and contributed to its momentum. Hemingway felt a story could be constructed the same way. Stream of Consciousness
The term was coined by William James in The Principles of Psychology for psychologists but has long been applied to literature. It is applied specifically to a mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator’s intervention, the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character’s mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings and random associations. When this technique is used, the story is always told from the first person’s point of view.
The Yoknapatawpha saga
Fictional setting in northern Mississippi for the saga of 14 novels and many stories by William Faulkner. Based on Lafayette County and its capital, Oxford, Faulkner’s mythical land, whose capital is called Jefferson. Yoknapatawpha County stands as a grand allegory about the real American South in history.
The characters involved in the life of this land include the Benbow, Compson, De Spain, McCaslin, Sartoris, Snopes, Stevens, Sutpen and Varner families
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