Literary realism is a type of literature that focuses on showing everyday life and common experiences in an accurate and simple way. It avoids unusual or exciting topics, exaggerated descriptions, and imaginary or supernatural events. This style includes both fiction, such as realistic fiction, and nonfiction writing. Literary realism is part of a larger realist art movement that started in the middle of the 19th century with French literature (such as works by Stendhal) and Russian literature (such as those by Alexander Pushkin). It aims to show familiar things, like daily activities and experiences, exactly as they are in real life.
Background
Realism in the arts is the effort to show life and events as they truly are, without using exaggerated or unusual styles. It avoids making things look more dramatic or adding elements that are not real, such as supernatural or overly fancy details. Realism has appeared in many periods in art and is often connected to skill, training, and the use of realistic techniques rather than stylized ones. In visual art, realism means accurately showing living things, perspective, and the way light and colors look. Realist art sometimes focuses on less pleasant or everyday scenes, as seen in styles like social realism or kitchen sink realism. Realism has influenced many areas, including opera (verismo), literature, theater, and Italian neorealist films. The painting movement of realism began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution. Realist artists rejected Romanticism, a style that had become popular in French art and literature, which started in the late 18th century.
In literature, realism became a major movement after 1848, as described by its first theorist, Jules-Français Champfleury. It aims to show everyday life and activities, especially among middle- or lower-class people, without adding dramatic or romantic elements. Realism tries to represent the world as it exists, without adding personal opinions or interpretations, and based on what can be observed and proven. This approach suggests that reality exists independently of human ideas and can be understood by artists through careful observation. As literary critic Ian Watt explains in The Rise of the Novel, modern realism began with the belief that truth can be found through the senses. This idea was influenced by thinkers like Descartes, Locke, and Thomas Reid in the 18th century.
In his work The Human Comedy (1842), Balzac said that creating art and doing science are similar because both use careful observation. Realist artists used scientific methods to study and understand the world. The scientific approach of the time valued facts, experiments, and proof, and believed in the power of science to improve society and study human behavior.
In the late 18th century, Romanticism was a movement that opposed the strict rules of the previous Age of Reason and the scientific focus on nature. It also reacted against the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution. Romanticism was most visible in art, music, and literature but also influenced history, education, and science.
In the 19th century, realism was a response to Romanticism and is sometimes called "bourgeois realism" because it focused on everyday life. However, not all Victorian writers used realism. The strict rules and limitations of Victorian realism led to the rise of modernism. Starting around 1900, modernist writers criticized the 19th-century social and political views, promoting ideas that rejected traditional realism and focused on new, more personal ways of storytelling.
Sub-genres of literary realism
Social realism is an international art movement that includes the work of painters, printmakers, photographers, and filmmakers. These artists focus on the everyday lives of working-class people and the poor. They also criticize the systems that cause difficult living conditions. While the styles of art vary by country, most use realistic or critical descriptions of life.
Kitchen sink realism, also called kitchen sink drama, is a British cultural movement from the late 1950s and early 1960s. It appeared in theater, art, novels, films, and television plays. This movement used social realism to show the lives of working-class people in Britain. Characters were often described as "angry young men," and stories focused on the daily lives of people living in small rented homes and spending free time in rough pubs. These works explored social and political issues.
Films, plays, and novels in this style often take place in poor industrial areas in northern England. They use the speech patterns and slang of those regions. The film It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) was an early example of this style. The play Look Back in Anger (1956) by John Osborne is considered the first major work of the genre. For example, the love triangle in Look Back in Anger happens in a small, one-room apartment in the English Midlands. This style continued into the 2000s, appearing in TV shows like Coronation Street and EastEnders.
In art, the term "Kitchen Sink School" was used by critic David Sylvester to describe painters who created realistic scenes of everyday life.
Socialist realism was the official art style of the Soviet Union, established by Joseph Stalin in 1934. It was later used by Communist groups worldwide. This style claimed that art should show the struggles of the working class and their path to a socialist future. A 1934 law stated that socialist realism was the required style for Soviet writers.
After Stalin’s death, some writers began to create more varied works, but changes happened slowly. Many Soviet writers still followed socialist realism’s rules, even when they disagreed with them. Socialist realism existed before 1934, starting during the Bolshevik Revolution. The 1934 law only made it the official style.
The official definition of socialist realism has been criticized for being confusing. Scholars like Peter Kenez noted that it was hard to balance showing life as it was with showing how it should be according to socialist ideas.
Naturalism was a literary movement from the 1880s to 1930s. It used detailed realism to show how social conditions, heredity, and environment strongly influenced people’s lives. Unlike Romanticism or Surrealism, naturalism focused on realistic, everyday life. It was influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. While realism only described life as it was, naturalism tried to explain the scientific causes of people’s actions, such as environment or genetics. Naturalistic works often showed harsh topics like poverty, racism, violence, and disease. These works were sometimes criticized for focusing on negative aspects of life.
Verismo was an Italian literary movement that aimed to show real life. It was led by writers like Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana. Characters in verismo stories were often poor or uneducated people struggling against difficult life conditions. They sometimes came from working-class backgrounds and had trouble adapting to society’s changes. Other stories focused on middle-class characters. Verismo was inspired by French naturalism but differed in one key way: naturalist writers believed literature could influence society and had moral responsibilities, while verismo writers thought literature could not change reality. Verismo writers avoided commenting on their characters and used language that matched the characters’ social class. For example, peasants used simple, local language, while middle-class characters used more formal speech.
Historical realism is a writing style or sub-genre of realistic fiction that focuses on real historical events or time periods. The structure and setting of these stories are based on actual history. Because of this, many historical realism works are philosophical in nature.
Realism in the novel
In the early 1800s, there was a growing push to create an Australian culture that was different from its British colonial past. Common themes in Australian realism included the Australian Outback, called "the bush," British settlers, Indigenous Australians, squatters, and diggers. Some of these themes became more mythical in Australian art. Much of Australia's early realism aimed to reject what a publication called the Sydney Bulletin described in 1881 as a "romantic identity" of the country.
Most early writing in the Australian colony was not considered literature in the modern sense but instead included journals and records of explorations and environments. However, early Australian literature often blended romanticism and realism. For example, Such Is Life (1897) by Joseph Furphy is a fictional story about the lives of people in rural areas of New South Wales and Victoria during the 1880s. Another example is Clara Morison (1854) by Catherine Helen Spence, which follows a Scottish woman moving to Adelaide, South Australia, during a time when many people were leaving South Australia to seek gold in Victoria and New South Wales.
The idea that Australia was simply a part of another, more distant country began to appear in writing. This was described as "understanding the significance of Australian history as a transplanting of stocks and the sending down of roots in a new soil." Henry Handel Richardson, who wrote novels after Australia became a federation, was influenced by French and Scandinavian realism. In the 20th century, as Sydney's working-class population grew, stories shifted from focusing on the bush to urban life. Books like The Working Man's Paradise (1892) by William Lane, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) by Christina Stead, and The Harp in the South (1948) by Ruth Park showed the tough lives of working-class people in Sydney. Patrick White's novels Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957) were especially successful, and in 1973, White won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
A new form of Australian realism began in the late 20th century with Monkey Grip (1977) by Helen Garner, which changed how Australian fiction was written. The book is based on Garner's own life and follows a single mother in Melbourne as she deals with a drug addict in her life. A type of realism called "dirty realism" emerged, focusing on the lives of young, lower-income people who often use drugs, alcohol, and casual sex to escape boredom. Examples include Praise (1992) by Andrew McGahan, Loaded (1995) by Christos Tsiolkas, and The River Ophelia (1995) by Justine Ettler. These works are now often labeled as "grunge lit."
Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), argued that the novel began in the early 18th century and was defined by its "formal realism," meaning it aimed to truthfully describe human experiences. He used examples like Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, who wrote about everyday people and their lives. Watt believed that the novel's focus on realistic stories about ordinary people matched the rise of middle-class individualism and the growth of the book trade. Defoe and Richardson, who were also tradesmen, understood their audience well and created stories that appealed to many readers.
In the late 19th century, George Eliot's Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72) was considered one of the greatest novels in the English language. It explored issues like the Reform Bill of 1832, the rise of railways, and advances in medicine. The book also showed how people in a small town resisted changes in society, politics, and technology.
George Gissing, known for New Grub Street (1891), was traditionally seen as influenced by Émile Zola, but some scholars, like Jacob Korg, suggest George Eliot had a greater influence on him. Other writers, such as Arnold Bennett and George Moore, imitated French realists. Bennett wrote about life in the Staffordshire Potteries, while Moore's Esther Waters (1894) was also inspired by Zola's naturalism.
William Dean Howells was the first American author to bring realism to American literature. His novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) tells the story of a man who loses his wealth due to his own mistakes. Josiah Gilbert Holland's Miss Gilbert’s Career (1860) was an early example of realism, written a decade before other American realists like Mark Twain and Stephen Crane began publishing.
Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, helped shape American literature with his use of realistic, everyday speech. His book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) became a classic. Stephen Crane, a journalist and writer, is best known for The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a powerful story about war. His earlier work, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), is one of the first naturalistic American novels, showing the struggles of a young girl from a poor, unstable home.
Realism in the theatre
Theatrical realism was a movement in 19th-century theatre from 1870 to 1960. It aimed to make plays and performances more like real life. It was part of a larger artistic movement and shared similarities with naturalism. Both styles focused on everyday middle-class life, normal speech, and simple settings. Realism and naturalism differ mainly in how much control characters have over their lives. Naturalism believes outside forces mostly shape people’s choices, while realism shows individuals can make their own decisions (as seen in A Doll's House).
In Russia, Aleksey Pisemsky, along with writers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy (The Power of Darkness, 1886), started a tradition of psychological realism. This tradition grew until the Moscow Art Theatre was created by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Their performances of Anton Chekhov’s plays influenced later writers like Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov. Stanislavski later developed a training method for actors called the "system," which helped actors portray realistic characters.
Realism in the 19th century is closely linked to modern drama. As Martin Harrison explains, modern drama began in the 1870s with the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen’s realistic plays written in prose had a major influence on theatre.
In opera, verismo is a style from post-Romantic Italy that borrowed ideas from Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen. It showed real-life situations, often including difficult or violent scenes, especially the lives of lower-class people.
In France, besides melodramas, popular and middle-class theatre in the mid-1800s turned to realism. This included the "well-made" farces of Eugène Marin Labiche and the moral plays of Émile Augier.
Criticism
Critics of realism argue that showing real life is not always accurate, with some people calling it "imaginary" or "created." This idea comes from the belief that people often do not understand what is truly real. To show reality, people use what they remember or experience. However, these memories or experiences may not match the actual truth. Instead, they often create a version of reality that is only loosely connected to what is actually true. Realism is criticized for not solving this problem, and this failure is seen as helping to ignore or hide the fact that reality is shaped by human perception. Catherine Gallagher says that realistic fiction often fails to support the ideas it claims to represent because if appearances were enough on their own, there would be no need for novels. This can be seen in literary naturalism, a style popular in the United States during the late 1800s, which focused on powerful forces that shape people's lives. For example, stories often described machines as huge and dangerous, destroying human bodies without hesitation. These machines were used as symbols, but the symbols made some stories feel more like myths than real life.
Some critics also say realism is flawed because it defines itself as a response to other literary styles, like Romanticism and the Gothic, which focus on unusual, emotional, or shocking stories. Some scholars argue that this reaction leads to a limit where realism either shows truth that can be proven or only shows limited, personal truths, which may not be real at all.
Other critics point out that realism does not have a clear definition. They argue that there is no pure form of realism, and it is hard to find literature that is not somewhat realistic. When people search for pure realism, it seems to disappear. J.P. Stern disagreed, saying that the lack of a strict definition makes the term useful in both everyday and literary discussions. Others dismiss realism as simple or unimportant, arguing that it is not art but just reporting, and based on simple ideas about the world.