Literary Realism

The nineteenth-century turn to ordinary contemporary life, middle- and working-class, rendered without romantic varnish.

Specifications & Metrics

era

c. 1830 – 1900

region

France, Russia, Britain, America

key figures

Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dickens, Twain

exemplar

Madame Bovary (1857); War and Peace (1869)

introduced

1830

Core Principles & Analysis

• Balzac's Human Comedy mapped an entire society as its founding monument.
• Realists built narrative on probability, contemporary settings, and plain style.
• It answered Romanticism's idealization with the social novel of everyday stakes.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Literary realism