Literary realism

A literary movement and mode that portrays ordinary life, social conditions, and characters through plausible detail. It favors recognizable settings and motives over idealization or supernatural events.

Realism: An approach that represents subjects as they appear in ordinary experience rather than idealizing or abstracting them. Literary realism is one artistic form of the broader commitment to plausible representation.
French realism: A nineteenth-century literary movement that depicted contemporary French society in detailed, unsentimental prose. France became an early center for realism as a self-conscious literary movement.
Free indirect discourse: A narrative style that blends third-person narration with a character’s idiom or thoughts without quotation marks. It lets realist fiction render private consciousness while retaining a socially observant narrator.
Madame Bovary: Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel about Emma Bovary, a provincial French woman dissatisfied with married life. Its precise account of Emma’s desires and circumstances became a landmark of French realism.
Naturalism: A late nineteenth-century literary movement that emphasizes heredity, environment, and material forces shaping human behavior. Naturalism grows from realist observation but gives causal forces a more deterministic weight.
The novel: A long work of prose fiction that typically develops characters and events across an extended narrative. The novel’s length and social reach made it a major vehicle for realist detail.
Honoré de Balzac: A French novelist whose linked works portray a broad cross-section of post-Napoleonic society. Balzac’s La Comédie humaine helped establish the scope of the realist social panorama.
Omniscient narrator: A narrator with broad access to characters’ thoughts, events, and background beyond any single viewpoint. Realist novels use this viewpoint to connect individual lives with wider social conditions.
Middlemarch: George Eliot’s 1871–72 novel about intersecting lives in a fictional English provincial town. Its interwoven characters reveal how private choices meet institutions and local society.
Magic realism: A narrative mode that presents extraordinary or magical events as ordinary within a recognizable world. Its matter-of-fact supernatural elements depart from realism’s usual reliance on plausible events.

Linked from 64 pages