Introduction
Realism can be broadly defined as the truthful depiction of reality and is a literary technique practiced by many writers in different historical periods. As William Dean Howells put it, “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” More narrowly defined, literary realism is a movement in art, which started in the nineteenth century in France, from where it has spread to many other countries and lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century. Realist authors described their contemporary life as it was, portraying everyday activities and experiences without embellishment or interpretation. Before the nineteenth century, major literary characters were royalty, dukes, knights, ghosts, monsters and other supernatural creatures. In the middle of the nineteenth century attention shifted to common people – farmers, merchants, lawyers and peasants. George Eliot, William Dean Howells, Honoré de Balzac, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Bolesław Prus and Émile Zola are all representatives of the realism movement in literature.
Realistic Literature
Artists and literary realists were heavily influenced by political and social changes that were taking place in Europe and in the United States, in particular by the development of science, the growth of commerce and the spread of democracy. Representatives of middle and lower class were becoming increasingly important in the life of the countries and in literature as well. Society was placing more value on an individual and, as a response to this, in literature characters were becoming more important than plot. Writers started using dialects and local vernaculars to make their stories even more realistic. The realists wanted to bring literature closer to science and assumed they can obtain truth by the simple observation and recording of reality.
