Realism

Realism can be defined many different ways. Many people do not really know how to define it, and it is tied very closely to Naturalism (Campbell). In fact, a majority of people do not know how to tell the difference between the two eras, so it is hard to try to explain the differences (Campbell). Realism started rising because people were getting sick of Romanticism, and they wanted more of science that had also been on the rise (Campbell). People had started working with science and the scientific a lot more (Campbell). They had started philosophizing, but not in ideals like Romanticists (Campbell). They philosophized quite rationally, and also started studying how previous documents had been written (Campbell). They wanted to know more about what was happening right in that day, and they focused a lot more on the here and now then about ideals or nature's influence on things (Campbell). They often told stories that did not have an obvious moral to them, because they would write of the everyday and try to draw their morals from that (Campbell). The Hero to them was a normal person that could draw morals from everything and knew how to grow from past experiences. The American Dream was to learn from every experience that they had, and to always be morally improving. They wrote more from the viewpoint of the middle class, so they could see society from a different perspective than they had in the past (Campbell). They could see how the higher class could flaunt their wealth and could be so mean, but they also saw how poor the lower classes were, and they may have felt pity. Realists concentrated a lot on ethical choices; sometimes ethical choices were what the whole plot was based off of (Campbell). The events could have really happened, and they wrote in the same style that they spoke, unlike previous authors who had written more poetically (Campbell). Realists were very different than Romanticists, because they were not concerned with ideals, but they were very similar to Naturalists, and it is often extremely hard to tell the difference between the two.

Campbell, Donna M. "Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890." Literary Movements. Dept. of English, Washington State University. 21 Mar. 2010. Web. 24 Jan. 2011.