Realism (Literary)

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi (Bath Spa University College)

The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.
Vol. editors: Nicole Kennedy (University of Newcastle)

Domains

Literature Topic
Movements, styles and periods (literature)

Dates

Date of occurrence 1811

Places

France (Location)
Russia (Location)
United Kingdom (Location)

Resources

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The History of Literary Realism

Realism is a comparatively old term that was first applied in the seventeenth-century to Dutch genre paintings of everyday life. It came by the 1850s to denote a genre predominantly related to the novel and an aesthetic sensibility uniting Romantic individualism with social determinism. Its earliest exponents were the French thinkers Jules Husson (1821-89), known as Champfleury, and Louis Edmond Duranty (1833-80) who defined its characteristics in essays published in the late 1840s and early 1850s which focused on the paintings of their contemporary Gustave Courbet (1819-77). Their critical arguments were political in origin and intention since Courbet's deliberately unglamorous paintings of rural life were intended as socialist critiques of conservative idealisation and coincided with the 1848 uprisings which shook nearly every major city in continental Europe.

For Champfleury and...

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3669 words

Citation: Hadjiafxendi, Kyriaki. "Realism (Literary)". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 December 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=933, accessed 07 December 2025.]