REALISM & NATURALISM

REALISM

The attempt in literature and art to

represent life as it really is, without

sentimentalizing or idealizing it.

Realistic writing often depicts the

everyday life and speech of ordinary people

REALIST THEMES

Experience of the commonplace

Focus on the middle class

Industrial revolution

Interactions between different classes and countries

Complex ethical choices

Ordinary characters are studied in depth

REALIST CHARACTERS

Shared guilt or responsibility

Not extraordinary, everyday people, middle class folk

No distinctive heroes or villains, mix of strengths and flaws

Motivated by survival, greed, self-preservation, materialistic

Deep connection w nature, each other, social class & past

Intricate and layered

Democratic, open to change and experimentation

REALIST WRITING STYLE

Regional dialects, extensive dialogue that connected w

public

Simple language so everyone can understand it

Specific to a time period, or place, or time in history

Character is more important than the plot

Descriptive writing, even if it is graphic

Comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact

Narrated by an outside voice

NATURALISM

An extreme form of realism

Naturalistic writers usually depict the

sordid side of life and show characters

who are severely, if not hopelessly,

limited by their environment or heredity.

NATURALIST THEMES

Nature (scientific observation)

Survival of the fittest

Lack of free will

Vice, dark side of humans & society

person vs. nature, person vs. self

Passions such as lust and greed

NATURALIST CHARACTERS

Frequently poorly educated or of the lower class

Their attempt at free will is hurt by forces beyond

their control

Struggle with conscience and determining their

fate

Characters controlled by fate & environment

Unable to stand up against the enormous weight of

circumstances

Characters are pushed to their limits.

NATURALIST CHARACTERS

Heredity & environment control the individual

Rejection of the supernatural

Nature vs. nurture

Chance, fate & destiny

Poverty, crime, violence, racism, intolerance,

disease, corruption, urban squalor, industrialism,

prostitution

NATURALIST WRITING STYLE

No sugar coating

Objective narrator

Plot twist at the end

Detailed violence

Formal language, piling on of images

Attention to setting to the point of saturation

KEY TERMS

Verisimilitude-the appearance of truth

Brute within-strong, warring emotions, and a fight for survival

Vernacular- the language or dialect spoken by the people of a

particular region

Determinism- belief that events are determined by forces

beyond the control of human beings; all events have sufficient

causes

Social Darwinism- survival of the fittest

KEY TERMS

Mimesis- imitation of the real world, as by re-creating

instances of human action and events portraying objects found

in nature

Muckrakers-American journalists & novelists who

exposed corruption in big business and government