The History of Literary Realism
Realism is a comparatively old term that was first applied in the seventeenth-century to Dutch genre paintings of everyday life. It came by the 1850s to denote a genre predominantly related to the novel and an aesthetic sensibility uniting Romantic individualism with social determinism. Its earliest exponents were the French thinkers Jules Husson (1821-89), known as Champfleury, and Louis Edmond Duranty (1833-80) who defined its characteristics in essays published in the late 1840s and early 1850s which focused on the paintings of their contemporary Gustave Courbet (1819-77). Their critical arguments were political in origin and intention since Courbet's deliberately unglamorous paintings of rural life were intended as socialist critiques of conservative
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Citation: Hadjiafxendi, Kyriaki. "Realism (Literary)". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 December 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=933, accessed 21 November 2024.]
