Realism

World Literature
Unit10

 The

Renaissance

Re-birth of learning.
Movement towards secular themes and

away from religious themes.

Works written in the vernacular of that
country.
A little more creative freedom, but still
very restrictive.
Sonnets

The Enlightenment
Reason was king.
Logic was applied to everythingeven literature.

LOTS of political and social unrest.

Middle class gets a voice and demands change.

Literature heavily espoused the philosophies of

the day.
Satire used a lot to mask the true meaning of
works.
Candide
La Fontaines Fables

 Romanticism
Backlash against reason / emphasized

the imagination.
Authors rebelled and experimented with
new forms of writing.
Emphasis on the individual.
Emphasis on nature.
Emphasis on the supernatural.

 Following

the natural progression,

what comes next?
The Age of Progress
Realism
Naturalism

Industrial Revolution
The explosion of scientific knowledge led to many new

technological advancements.

Steam Engine
Electric Dynamo
Production of Aluminum and Steel
Telegraph
Electric Light
Repeating Rifle

Factories popped up everywhere.

Shift from rural to urban
Farm workers came in droves to find factory jobs.
Unprepared cities could not handle the flux in population and
slums resulted.
Darwins Theory of Evolution

Many prospered during the Industrial Revolution.

New middle class of bankers, manufacturers, and

lawyers.

This dominant class became optimistic that material progress

would better humanity.

The Objectors

Karl Marx
Economic theorist and philosopher.
Major force in establishing the communist movement.
Peasants lived in abject poverty.
The cities became polluted and dangerous.
Children and adults worked twelve hour days, six days a

week.

Children worked as draft animals, pulling carts of coal.

Factories provided unsafe working conditions.

 Many

writers were disturbed by the

ever-increasing gap between the rich
and the poor.
Realism
Naturalism

Realism
Careful observers of the world as it is.
Romanticism did this too (in fact, several authors
during this time are considered Romantic and Realist)
but it has to do with how they presented the world
they saw day in and day out.

Realists eliminated sentimentality from their

tone and excessive decoration from their

descriptions.

Their aim was to observe and record the lives of

ordinary people without distorting the truth.
Of course, no author can completely withhold judgment or
feeling form his or her work, and good writing does more
than mirror reality.

A radical off-shoot of Realism that

developed in France in the 1870s.
Led by mile Zola
The members considered free will an
illusion.
Showed characters as helpless victims of heredity,

fate, and environment.

Tried to abolish the line between scientist

and artist.
Most writers had trouble staying within the narrow

limits of their own ideology.

Poetry during this time is marked by

Symbolism.

Realism especially flourished in Russia.

Ivan Turgenev
Leo Tolstoy
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Anton Chekhov

The realist movement helped inspire a movement

to liberate the serfs, and later, the entire society.
Not based in social reform, but rather trying to
ask the most daunting human questions.
How should people live?
What are good and evil?

During the Romantic era, poetry was the

dominant form of writing, and during the
Realist movement it was prose.
There were a few notable playwrights including

Henrik Ibsen.

Nowadays we are used to being a fly on the wall during

a drama performance Ibsen created that.
Prior to Ibsen, plays were usually about extraordinary
people and the lines were delivered in verse.
Ibsen popularized dramas about ordinary people
experiencing the heartbreak of ordinary life.
Problem Plays