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The Realistic Period By: Monique Avila Shanel Cervantes Venus Phan Victor Valle

The Realistic Period

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Page 1: The Realistic Period

The Realistic Period

By:

Monique Avila Shanel Cervantes Venus Phan

Victor Valle

Page 2: The Realistic Period

What is Realism?

• Realism is a literary movement that occurred during 1865-1900. It focused on giving a view of what was occurring at that time, and on providing insight into what was really going on in society.

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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.“

- From The Novel and Its Future By: George Parsons Lathrop

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How did Realism come to be?

• “As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture.”

- (Campless)

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Characteristics

• Reaction against Romanticism (A literary movement that focused around feeling, imagination, and intuition).

• Realism is situated with truth and depicted life and society as they were.

• Focuses mainly on present issues and truths from now rather than the past or fantasy.

• Focus is on the characters rather than the actual plot • The class of the characters are important and usually

portray the middle or lower class.• Events that occur in the story are predictable because of

the lack of over dramatization and fantasy.• Diction is natural (talking, conversational).

(Campless)

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• Springing from a developed outrage to romanticism, realism is known as the complete opposite, and focuses on ongoing social issues that should not be disregarded.

• Realism rejects romantic themes of artificiality and ignorance, and instead embraces raw life as something beautiful and art worthy.

Opposing Romanticism

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• In 1855, the realism flame sparked from the painter, Gustave Courbet, who preferred to address the social issues of France, such as the vile poverty that filled the streets.

• After being denied acceptance in Exposition Universelle, he opened his own gallery, The Pavillion of Realism, and was able to independently present his realistic work. He was soon seen as the heroic father of French art realism.

Realism in France

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REALISM ROMANTICISM

• Truth• Ugly• Objectively real• Focuses on directing

attention to the problems at hand

• Emotion• Imagination• Nationalism• Escape from reality

Realism VS. Romanticism

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• Artists aimed to put ignored issues of the time into an art form.

• They focused on subjects that were seen as ordinary, uninteresting, and dull because they believed these subjects had the most truth to give.

The Artists Approach on Realism

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• In 1925, German art critic, Frank Roh, first used the term to describe the unusual realism seen in the work of American painters.

• This specific realism consisted of fantasy scenarios taking place in average settings.

• However, as the term became adopted, it was used to describe fantasy in literature, but extremely realistic events in visual art form.

• Where scenarios that don’t make much sense are put into real life settings.

• It is also a very popular genre used in Latin America, and also part of contemporary writing.

Magical Realism

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Mark Twain

• In 1873, Mark Twain, along with Charles Dudley Warner, wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which became the basis for the realism era.

• He created a new style for authors to follow, which went against the old New England way of writing.

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Excerpt from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain

• …He was not more than thirty-five, but he had a worn look that made him seem older. He left the stile, entered that part of his house which was the store, traded a quart of thick molasses for a coonskin and a cake of beeswax to an old dame in linsey-woolsey,4 put his letter away, and went into the kitchen. His wife was there, constructing some dried apple pies; a slovenly urchin of ten was dreaming over a rude weather-vane of his own contriving; his small sister, close upon four years of age, was sopping corn-bread in some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan and trying hard not to sop over a finger-mark that divided the pan through the middle—for the other side belonged to the brother, whose musings made him forget his stomach for the moment; a negro woman was busy cooking, at a vast fire-place. Shiftlessness and poverty reigned in the place.(Twain)

- In this passage, Twain sets up the context for a character in the story. He portrays the man as a common man, not too extravagant, and shows realistic context/background rather than something fantasy – which is the base of Realism.

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William Dean Howells • He was an editor for the Boston-

based Atlantic Monthly, and was awarded with many prestigious honors from several colleges such as Oxford.

• His literature included characters similar to ordinary people and was based on contemporary and sometimes controversial social themes.

• Some of his works include A Modern Instance, A Hazard of New Fortunes, and Rise of Silas Lapham which all deal with reoccurring common-life issues.

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A Modern Instance and Realism

• The novel, A Modern Instance, revolves around a marriage between the two main characters, Bartley Hubbard and Marcia Gaylord. The marriage starts off as something that looks like it will be perfect forever- like something that will never become bad. But as the story progresses, the true reality of problems that come along with marriage are revealed. With this, both characters fall into dilemmas that go with relationship problems.

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Henry James• Regarded as one of the key

figures in the realistic literature, he often wrote about the two growing super powers of the world, the Old World (Britain) and the New World (America).

• In his works, he developed a stereotype for which his characters were based on. Those from the Old World were portrayed as beautiful, alluring, yet corrupt, while the New World characters closely followed their virtues, such as freedom, and had a greater character.

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Kate Chopin

• Kate Chopin was a feminist author who wrote about sensitive topics that most often were experienced by woman.

• Her most popular work, The Awakening, focused on the women's ambitions and the hardships they face.

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Another kind of Realism

• Two black writers, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt, captured the different overlooked southern black culture.

• Both accomplished this is in a diverse way, Dunbar through his poetic Lyrics of Lowly Life, and Chesnutt through his fictional short story, The Conjure Women.

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Life from Lyrics of a Lowly Life• A CRUST of bread and a corner to sleep

in,A minute to smile and an hour to weep in,A pint of joy to a peck of trouble,And never a laugh but the moans come double;And that is life!

• A crust and a corner that love makes precious,With the smile to warm and the tears to refresh us;And joy seems sweeter when cares come after,And a moan is the finest of foils for laughter;And that is life!

- A lot of Realism was inspired by the harsh treatment of slaves and things that African Americans (mostly) had to endure. Dunbar, who was African American, expressed this in his writings and poems from the time, by showing the emotional feel of life for an African American during this time.

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• Louis Dagurre, developed the first form of a photograph, the daguerreotype, in 1837, and presented it as the gift of France in 1839.

• The Daguerreotype gave way to the ultimate realism piece. It capture the still truth the movement was devoted to.

Help From The Photograph

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Works Cited

• Campless, Donna. "Realism in American Literature." (2008): Web. 2 Jan 2010.

http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm>.

• “Romanticism VS Realism Comparision Table." Anoka-Ramsey. Web. 2 Jan 2010.

<http://webs.anokaramsey.edu/stankey/Eng2230/Docs2230/Romantic>.

• Twain, Mark. The Gilded Age. New York:Random House Inc., 2006.

• “Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Collection.” Wright State University Library. Web. 8 Aug 2008. 3 Jan 2010. <http://www.libraries.wright.edu/special/dunbar/>