Realism

Question 1

Realism characteristics (7)

Answer 1

• European roots: Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal and Gustave Flaubert (France) and William Thackeray (England)
• In general, more concrete in feeling, interests and style than Romantic narratives and the Romance
• Interested in exploring (roughly) contemporary society
• Often encompassing and panoramic
• Democratic perception: interest in ordinary people and subjects
• Materialistic perspective
• Influenced by journalism, science and the use of dialects.

Question 2

Realism plots

Answer 2

-Character-centred, action-oriented and emphasize cause-effects relationships.
-Often about small town life or the contrast between small-town life and urban life

Question 3

Realism style and symbolism

Answer 3

STYLE: transparent with minimal authorial intervention.
- Interest everyday language: dialect, triviality
- Characters more singularized, individualized, seldom allegorical

SYMBOLISM:
Allegorical, metaphorical relations give way before relations of continuity:
- From “verticality” (Puritan and American Renaissance authors) to “horizontality”
- From metaphorical to metonymic.
- From eternal to temporal
- From “God” to “the network”

Question 4

Causes from romanticism to realism

Answer 4

1. Generation relay
2. Culture of practicality due to the Civil War and its aftermath, industrial and scientific development, territorial expansion and the gradual closing of the frontier.

REALISM offers “truth and sanity”/ “the treatment of the material” and Good being treated as “more real” than Evil.
ROMANTICISM, however, is “sickly and make-believe, untrue to life as we know it first-hand” evolving later into a “critical realism”.

Question 5

Genteel realism: W.D. Howells

Answer 5

• Middle-class world.
• Standard English.
• Polite, refined writing.
• Mannered characteristics

Question 6

Local color/ regional realism: Mark twain, Bret Harte

Answer 6

-Rural/ frontier life.
-Lower class
-Dialect

Question 7

Women’s realism: Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Warthon

Question 8

Realism. Mark Twain characteristics (7)

Answer 8

• Against fantasy and make-believe
• For the immediate
• Realism implied a rejection of hierarchical society and a defense of equality and democracy
• Great stylist in a broad linguistic range
• Agile narrator
• Skilful depiction of character
  Humor often conveys stong social critique and a tragic view of life