Rise of literary realism

Literary realism was a movement that sought to portray ordinary life and society accurately, without romantic idealization, and it flourished roughly between 1830 and 1900. It emerged in France with writers such as Stendhal, Honore de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary became a model of the style. Realist authors wrote about the middle and lower classes, money, work and the social forces that shape people. In Britain it was represented by George Eliot and Charles Dickens, in Russia by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, and in the United States by William Dean Howells and Mark Twain. A more extreme offshoot, naturalism, led by Emile Zola, emphasized heredity and environment. Modernism later reacted against it.

Open on the timeline