The Essence of Realism in Literary Fiction

Understanding Realism in Literature

The novel is distinguished by its formal realism: it is stocked with people and places that seem real or evoke the real world.

The Role of Unrealistic Elements

Parody and satire are often unrealistic, but they can cause us to see our everyday world very differently. Sometimes, that which distorts what the real world is like may actually lead us to see it more accurately.

Key Perspectives on Realism

• Georg Lukács: He argued that the classic realistic novel of the 19th century was the pinnacle of the novel's artistic achievement, and a decline took place from that point on.
• Bertolt Brecht: The German dramatist believed we must not derive realism from particular existing works. For him, realism is not a question of form or content, but of function. Novels that are most like our everyday reality are not always the ones that lead us to think most critically about that reality.

The Paradoxical Nature of Realism

Realism is inherently unstable and paradoxical. Very often, that which is later accepted as realistic will at first appear unrealistic, or art which appears realistic to one generation may appear artificial to a subsequent one. Romance-like elements, fantastic details, and parody may be used to explore our sense of the real, as seen in works like Gulliver’s Travels and Changing Places.

Representative Coverage of Social Life

The term “realism” very often implies that the artist has tried to include a wider and more representative coverage of social life in their work. He or she has extended the coverage of the work to include “low life” and the experiences of those deemed unworthy of artistic portrayal by other artists (e.g., Defoe’s Moll Flanders vs. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock).

The Realist Literary Movement

Origins and Method

As a literary movement, Realism started in France in the 19th century with authors like Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert. These writers made enormous efforts to ensure that “factual details” in their works were “correct”—that is, capable of being checked against an external reality by empirical investigation.

The Function of Novels

Novels can be categorized by their relationship to reality:

• Those which cause us to think about reality critically.
• Those which encourage us to escape from reality into a world of illusory imaginings.