Reading Notes W10: Realism Across the World, Part A

Realism Across the World (625-630)
  • Due to empires expanding and new methods of transportation and communication, the world grew closer together in the 19th century (625)
  • Literary movements were able to spread fast
  • Charles Baudelaire in Paris, had an impact in  Nicaragua and Japan
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had an impact on Germany
  • Thomas Hardy had an impact in Britain
  • One of the most influential movement in the 19th century was realism
  • It began in Britain and France and spread worldwide (625)
  • In example, Higuchi Ichiyo, published fiction at the end of the 19th century and departed from Japanese literary conventions 
  • She focused on poor characters in the city as they struggled to make choices
  • "She added colloquial speech and lively dialogue that sounded more natural than the speech of traditional literary characters" (626)
  • Realist writers around the world share crucial aims and characteristics meaning they told the unvarnished truth about the world
  • The revolutionary overturned hierarchies and the rise of democracy and the middle class had inspired writers to throw off old literary forms and conventions (626)
  • Realist writers lost faith in nature no longer seeming to provide a plausible alternative 
  • "Now all that was left of reality was what you could see with your naked eyes: gritty, ugly industries; the power of money; starving, broken workers; etc" (627)
  • Art with beauty no longer existed and visual art and literature were looked at as hideous
  • Realist writers wanted to capture the world as it was
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote about different classes-showing encounters between the rich and the poor in attempt to give a realistic picture of a whole society (627)
  • Some writers tried focusing on individuals 
  • They used individual characters to represent whole groups
  • The realists did not always agree about what constituted reality or how best to capture it in words or paint (628)
  • They tended to focus on the immediate, material causes of social misery and looked to scientists and social thinkers for solution rather than aspiring ideas (628)
  • Writers everywhere try to capture the troubled, painful, struggling world of their own experience (630) 

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