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I. Realism in Literature
- a. Belief that the world should be viewed realistically was related to the materialstic outlook
- b. Realism was first employed in 1850 to describe a new style of painting and soon spread to literature
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Literary Realists
- a. Litrary Realists were distinguished by their deliberate rejection of Romanticism
- i. Literary Realists wanted to deal with ordinary characters from real life rather than Romantic heroes in unusual settings
- ii. They also sought to avoid flowery and sentimental language by using careful observation and accurate description, an approach that led them to eschew poetry in favor of prose and the novel
- iii. Realists often combined their interest in everyday life with a searching examination of social questions
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Leading novelists
- a. Leading novelist of 1850s and 1860s, the Frenchman Gustave Flaubert, perfected the Realist novel
- i. Madame Bovary described the barren and sordid small-town life in France
- 1. Emma Bovary, a woman of some vitality, is trapped in marriage to drab doctor; romantic love in novels leads her to have affairs but eventually kills herself, unrepentant to the end
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William Thackeray
- a. William Thackeray wrote Britain’s prototypical Realist novel, Vanity Fair: A Novel W/O a Hero in 1848
- i. He flouted the Romantic conventions
- 1. Novel should convey reality, not tragedy or poem
- b. Charles Dickens, whose realistic novels focusing on the lower andmiddle classes in Britain’s early industrial age became extraordinarily successful
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