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Literature vocabulary · Literary Movements

Realism

Meaning in literature, with examples

/ˈrɪəlɪzəm/nounCommon term

In literature, Realism means: A nineteenth-century literary movement that aimed to show ordinary life and ordinary people accurately, without idealizing them, often with attention to social detail.

In Turkish: realizm, gerçekçilik

How it is used

Major realists include Balzac and Flaubert in France, George Eliot in England and Tolstoy in Russia. Realism reacted against Romanticism and led to Naturalism. In Turkish literature, Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil's Aşk-ı Memnu is a key realist novel.

Example sentences

  1. Flaubert's Madame Bovary is often taught as a model of Realism.

  2. The realist novel pays close attention to money, class and marriage.

Common collocations

  • literary realism
  • social realism
  • the realist novel
  • nineteenth-century realism
  • NaturalismA late nineteenth-century development of Realism that showed human behavior as shaped by heredity, environment and social conditions, often in a harsh, scientific way.
  • RomanticismA movement in literature and art from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century that valued emotion, imagination, nature and the individual over reason and rules.
  • magical realismA style of fiction in which magical or impossible events happen in an otherwise realistic, everyday world and are described as if they were completely normal.
  • literary movementA group of writers in a particular period who share similar ideas, styles and aims, such as Romanticism, Realism or Modernism.
  • novelA long story written in prose that describes imaginary people and events, usually long enough to fill a whole book and to develop characters in detail.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Literary Movements

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