Attention

1. Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot

2. Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject.

3. Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past.

4. Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class.

5. Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances.

6. Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.

7. Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminished as the century progressed.

4.0 Conclusion

Realism is so strongly associated with the late nineteenth century that it tends to represent the age. It has become a literary symbol of industrial economics and has been labeled by many critics as a middle-class institution. It is important to remember that any literary form is always working either in tandem with or against alternative forms of discourse. The socially conscious aim of realist writing does allow a comparison to other types of discourse with a shared ethical mission. These include sermonic discourse and educational discourse. When critics evaluate realism solely as a narrative style or a mode of representation, they limit the possibilities for understanding it in relation to a larger cultural context such as competing claims to cultural authority. This limitation may be an inherent flaw in the history of literary criticism that ignores alternative discourses against which realist writers styled their texts. More precisely, it has proven to be nearly impossible to offer a consistent paradigmatic description of realism. The reason for this is that other important expressions of literary and cultural authority are overlooked in the attempt.

5.0 Summary

Realist writers of the nineteenth century grappled with a method of writing that purported to be both new and more truthful than previous modes of literary representation. This is a paradoxical classification because it assumes there are degrees of realness or truthfulness. These are categories that should be absolute.

Realist writings are assumed to be superior literature which comes closest to representing the tangible world. Closely connected to the belief in the relative superiority of realist literature is the aesthetic implication that literature has a transformative capacity in relation to social behavior and ethical practices. Realists assert such literary authority by suggesting that the writer functions as a social scientist looking for truisms in culture. This is really an attempt to narrow the

conditions of certainty regarding that which is knowable. Such a claim shifts the philosophical focus of the pursuit of truth and knowledge from an intuitive grasp of the ideal realm to the immediate physical world and the experience of interacting with the world of objects and things. For example, when comparing the observational skills of the writer to the expertise required of the natural scientist, William Dean Howells writes: ―But let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires‖ (Criticism and Fiction 104). In other words, realist writers began to base their literary authority on the assumption that what they produced was more real, more truthful, and more authoritative than the work of their predecessors, and they tried to develop literary paradigms that reinforced this ideology.

6.0 Tutor-marked Assignment

1. Discuss the development of the realist mode in American literature 2. List five American realist novelists and their works

7.0 References/ Further Reading

Armstrong, Nancy (2005). How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719-1900. New York: Columbia UP.

Arvin, Newton. (2015). ―Homage to Robert Herrick.‖ New Republic 5 Mar. 1935.

www.newrepublic.com. Web. 10 July 2015.

Baym, Nina. (1981). ―Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Literature Exclude Women Authors.‖ American Quarterly 33.2: 123-39.

Beard, George Miller. (1972). American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences.

New York: Arno Press and the New York Times.

Bell, Michael Davitt (1993). The Problem of American Realism: Studies in The Cultural History of a Literary Idea. Chicago: U of Chicago P.

Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition

Lathrop George Parsons (1874), 'The Novel and its Future," Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874):313 24.

Abeln, Paul (2005). William Dean Howells and the Ends of Realism. Routledge: New York.

Adams, Henry (2000). The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,

.

Adams, Henry (1985). ―William James, Henry James, John La Farge, and the

Foundations of Radical Empiricism.‖ American Art Journal 17, no. 1 (Winter,):

60-67.

Adams, Henry, et al. (1987). John La Farge: Essays. New York: Abbeville Press.

Adams, Steven (1994). The Barbizon School and the Origins of Impressionism.

London: Phaidon.

Anesko, Michael, ed. (1997). Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. New York: Oxford University Press.

Booth, Wayne C. (1961). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Bowron, Bernard R. (1951). "Realism in America." In Comparative Literature, Vol. 3, No. 3: 268-285.

Chase, Richard. (1957). The American Novel and Its Tradition. NY: Doubleday &

Company, inc.

Fluck, Winfried. (2003). ―American Culture and Modernity: A Twice-Told Tale.

―in REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 19. 65-80.

Galens, David. (ed.). (2002). Literary Movements for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Literary Movements. Detroit: Thompson.

Lawrence, Kathy Kurtzman. (2004). ―Margaret Fuller‗s Aesthetic Transcendentalism and Its Legacy.‖ in The America Renaissance. Edited and with an Introduction by Harold Bloom. NY: Chelsea House Publishers. 273-296.

Kolb, Harold H. (1969). The Illusion of Life: American Realism as a Literary Form.

Charlottesville: The UP. Of Virginia.

Matthiessen, F. O. (1941). American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford UP.

Miller, Perry. (1967). "The Romance and the Novel." in Nature‗s Nation.

Massachusetts: The Belknap Press (of Harvard UP.): 241-278.

Pizer, Donald. (1984). Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (revised edition). Carbondale. State Illinois UP.

Salomon, Roger B. (1964). "Realism as Disinheritance: Twain, Howells, and James."

in American Quarterly, vol. 16: 531-544.

Veeder, William and Susan M. Griffin (Eds.) (1968). The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P.

MODULE 3