REALISM
| Bret Harte | Stephen Crane |
| Ambrose Bierce | Jack London |
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Amputations: "The trademark of Civil War surgery, amputations accounted for 75 percent of all operations performed by Civil War doctors. More arms and legs were chopped off in this war than in any other fought by this country. Three out of every four wounded soldiers were hit in the extremities, and at that time, amputation was the only proper medical treatment..." |
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Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are
apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from
these their full value and true meaning. It would apprehend in all
particulars the connection between the familiar and the extraordinary, and
the seen and unseen of human nature. Beneath the deceptive cloak of
outwardly uneventful days, it detects and endeavors to trace the outlines of
the spirits that are hidden there; tho measure the changes in their growth,
to watch the symptoms of moral decay or regeneration, to fathom their
histories of passionate or intellectual problems. In short, realism reveals.
Where we thought nothing worth of notice, it shows everything to be rife
with significance. -- George Parsons Lathrop, 'The Novel and its Future," Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874):313 24.
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| “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” --William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine (November 1889), p. 966.
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"Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the
sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances.
Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact. Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses. Interior or psychological realism a variant form." From: http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/enl311/realism.htm Accessed 4/13/04.
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| Realism, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm. --Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911) |
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© P Carnie, February 2003
Last update: 03/27/2008