Realism (Literary)

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi (Bath Spa University College)

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The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.
Vol. editors: Nicole Kennedy (University of Newcastle)

Domains

Literature Topic
Movements, styles and periods (literature)

Dates

Date of occurrence 1811

Places

France (Location)
Russia (Location)
United Kingdom (Location)

Resources

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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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3669 words

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 05 April 2025.]