Division 9:Realism

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Division 9Realism

• Focus In

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Realism in France, Russia, Northern Europe

• In Europe, the realist movement arose in the 50s
  of the 19th century and had its origin in France.
• In art and literature the term realism is used to
  identify a literary movement in Europe and the
  United States in the last half of the 19th
  century and the early years of the 20th century.
• Balzac is particularly celebrated for his
  monumental The Human Comedy inspired by that of
  Dantes Divine Comedy.
• An inspiration to many realistic writers,
  Flaubert is often called the first French realist
  and a model not only to French authors but to
  Americans and Russians as well.

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Realism in France, Russia, Northern Europe

• Flauberts Madame Bovary with its unrelenting
  objectivity and detachment marks the beginning of
  a new era literature.
• Zola was the founder of the naturalist school. A
  slice of life was his motto.
• Zola defined the theory of naturalism and
  illustrated it in his great work entitled Les
  Rougen-Macquarts.
• It was not until the eighteenth century, when
  Peter the Great carried through the reforms that
  Russians really came into contact with the
  literature of Western Europe.
• Gogol was the first master of fiction in Russia
  to leave romantic conventions and go to life for
  his subjects.

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Realism in France, Russia, Northern Europe

• Turgenev was the first Russian author to gain
  recognition in the West.
• Dostoyevskys Crime and Punishment is another
  study of criminal psychology. It is the most
  popular of his novels.
• Dostoyevsky regarded The Brothers Karamazov as
  his masterpiece which was never completed.
• Apart from his literary work, Tolstoy holds an
  important position in his own countrys cultural
  history as an ethical philosopher and religious
  reformer.

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Realism in France, Russia, Northern Europe

• Chichikov is the chief character in Gogols
  famous novel Dead Soul, which is full of humorous
  sympathy with plain people and satirical contempt
  for sham and hypocrisy.
• Ibsens masterpiece A Dolls House is a plea for
  the emancipation of women.
• Ibsens work is sharply critical of the hypocrisy
  and seamy politics of Norwegian provincial life.
• Strindbergs first significant play was Master
  Olaf which is considered Swedens first great
  drama.

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Realism in England, the United States

• The period of realism in English literature
  corresponds roughly to the latter half of the
  reign of Queen Victoria.
• Charles Dickens best book is David Copperfield,
  a kind of autobiographical romance, in which his
  power over our everyday emotion is unrivalled.
• George Eliots masterpiece Middle March was
  regarded by some critics as the finest English
  novel of the 19th century.
• Everywhere in Thomas Hardys novels human beings
  appear to be crushed by a superior force, a
  pitiless fate and the indifference of his fellow
  creatures.

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Realism in England, the United States

• Bernard Shaw was a member of the Fabian Society
  whose aim was to make a transition from
  capitalism to socialism without violence.
• The Civil War has been called the Great Divide of
  American history. Between 1870 and 1890 the
  population in the U. S. Doubled. That began what
  Mark Twain called the Gilded Age an age of
  excess and extremes, of decline and progress, of
  poverty and dazzling wealth, of gloom and hope.
• Harriet Beecher Stowes anti-slavery novel Uncle
  Toms Cabin was acclaimed the greatest of all
  anti-slavery manifestoes.

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Realism in England, the United States

• Considered by many to be the greatest of all
  American poets, Whitman celebrated the freedom
  and dignity of the individual and sang the
  praises of democracy and the brotherhood of man.
• Whitmans best known poem was When Lilac Last in
  the Dooryard Bloomd, which expresses his grief
  over the death of Lincoln.
• Over a 37-year period, whitman published nine
  separate editions of his masterpiece Leaves of
  Grass.

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Realism in England, the United States

• Mark Twain is justly called the Lincoln of
  American literature. His novel The advantures of
  Huckleberry Finn, a master of human,
  characterization and realism, has been considered
  the first modern American novel.

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Art, Music at the Turn of the Century

• In Millets painting there was not the kind of
  brutality and vulgarity one finds in Courbet
  because millet was completely outside the circle
  of politics.
• The chief characteristics of the impressionist
  style were first seen in monets landscapes in
  which the forms are broken by loose brushstrokes
  and the colours of objects are reflected into
  other objects throughout the painting.
• Manet was regarded as the leader of the
  impressionist movement. To him, reality was not a
  world of solid objects but of sensation of light
  and colour in changing and fleeting patterns.

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Art, Music at the Turn of the Century

• Monet was the French painter who developed the
  technique of broken-colour painting.
• French painters who originally allied themselves
  with the impressionists found that impressionism
  lacked form and structure. They began to seek new
  ways of expression and became post-impressionists.
  
• Sunflower, a subject that is repeated in Vincent
  van Goghs paintings to express his vision of an
  ideal world.
• Paul Gauguin was a French post-impressionist who
  had great influence on modern painters in their
  use of pure and strong colors.

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Art, Music at the Turn of the Century

• The man who led sculpture into the realm of Art
  for Arts Sake was Auguste Rodin, the first
  sculptor of genius since Bernini in Renaissance
  Italy.
• Grieg was a nationalist Norwegian composer. He
  had earned the nickname of Chopin of the North.
• French composer Debussy has been described as the
  founder of modern musical impressionism.

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Supplementary Story

• From Realism to Expressionism