Realism

Question 1

Realism
Characteristics (7)

Answer 1

• European roots: Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal and Gustave Flaubert (France) and William Thackeray (England)
• In general, more concrete in feeling, interests and style than Romantic narratives and the Romance
• Interested in exploring (roughly) contemporary society
• Often encompassing and panoramic (panorama of contemporary society)
• Democratic perception: interest in ordinary people and subjects
• Materialistic perspective
• Influenced by journalism, science and the use of dialects.

Question 2

Realism
Plots

Answer 2

• Character-centred, action-oriented and emphasize cause-effects relationships.
• Characters more singularized, individualized, seldom allegorical.
• Often about small town life or the contrast between small-town life and urban life

Question 3

Realism
Style (3) and symbolism (5)

Answer 3

STYLE: transparent with minimal authorial intervention.
- Interest everyday language: dialect, triviality

SYMBOLISM:
Allegorical, metaphorical relations give way before relations of continuity:
- From “verticality” (Puritan and American Renaissance authors) to “horizontality”
- From metaphorical to metonymic.
- From eternal to temporal
- From “God” to “the network”

Question 4

Causes from romanticism to realism

Answer 4

1. Generational relay
2. Culture of practicality due to the Civil War and its aftermath, industrial and scientific development, territorial expansion and the gradual closing of the frontier.

REALISM offers “truth and sanity”/ “the treatment of the material” and Good being treated as “more real” than Evil.
ROMANTICISM, however, is “sickly and make-believe, untrue to life as we know it first-hand” evolving later into a “critical realism”.

Question 5

Realism
Genteel realism: W.D. Howells

Answer 5

• Middle-class world.
• Standard English.
• Polite, refined writing.
• Mannered characteristics

Question 6

Realism
Local color/ regional realism: Mark twain, Bret Harte

Answer 6

• Rural/ frontier life.
• Lower class
• Dialect

Question 7

Women’s realism: Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Warthon

Question 8

Realism
Mark Twain
- Characteristics (7)
- Works
- Travels (2)
- Historical fiction (2)
- Social criticism (3)
- Regional realism (5)

Answer 8

Characteristics
- Against fantasy and make-believe
- For the immediate
- Realism implied a rejection of hierarchical society and a defense of equality and democracy
- Great stylist in a broad linguistic range
- Agile narrator
- Skilful depiction of character
- Humor often conveys strong social critique and a tragic view of life

Work

• Travel
  -“Innocent Abroad”
  -“A Tramp Abroad”
• Historical fiction
  -*” The Prince and the Pauper”
  - “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc”
• Social criticism
  - “The Gilded Age”
  - “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburgh”
  - “A Connecticut Yankee in King Athrur’s Court”
• Regional realism
  - “Roughing It”
  - “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”
  - “Life on the Mississippi”
  - “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
  - “Pudd’nhead Wilson”