Realismo DISSERTATION TOPIC: THE ERA OF REALISM AND NATURALISM

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THE ERA OF REALISM AND NATURALISM

NAMES:

• Chirinos Mamani Harold
• Callizaya Rojas Jimena
• Paucara Flores Liliana
• Poma Fernandez Aylin Yanela
• Vera Callisaya Grace Solange

SUBJECT:

• Literature II L2

2016

THE ERA OF REALISM AND NATURALISM

In France , realism had become a very serious literary movement that changed the relationship between literature and society.

In literature, realism gives us a picture of life as it really is. Story of realism deal with everyday problems that most people encounter. Sometimes the characters overcome their problems; other times, they don’t.

William Dean Howell  (1837-1920)

He created the first theory for American realism. In 1891, he became the editor of Harper´s Monthly in New York City. He was against romanticism because it created false views about life. For French novelist, realism was an ideology and the novel had the power to become a political weapon.

Many of the romantic novels of the time were written for young female readers. «Old-fashioned heroes» and «unnecessary sacrifices» were common elements in the pretty pictures of life they created for such readers.

“The novelists might be the greatest possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation.”

He thought that novels “should make you think . . . and shame you into wishing to be a more helpful creature than you are.” He disapproved of the way that French realists filled their novels with murder, crime and “guilty sex”. He thought that “American novels should depict the more smiling aspects of life”.

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES (1890)

It is about a man who learns about the terrible suffering of poor people in society.

Howell became a kind of socialist, attacking the evils of American capitalism, its selfish competition. He changed his ideology of realism: art and artist must serve the poor people of society. He began to write “Utopian” novels about an ideal society with perfect justice and happiness. “A traveler from Altruria (1834) ”and “Through the Eye of the Needle (1907)”.

HENRY JAMES (1843 - 1916) was a realist writer, but not a naturalist. He was not interested on writing about politics, business or the conditions of the society, but on people’s mind. The realism of his works underlie in what happens in the characters mind during or after certain events, psychological realism. Few of his stories include big events or exciting action scenes. Instead, they try to describe or show what is happening in his characters’ min.  This situation can be analyzed answering questions such as : What do they see?, how do they try to understand it?  And the changing of characters’ consciousness is the real story of his stories. Most of his works did not become popular until the evolution of modern psychology that would happen during the next century.

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