Realism And Romance

Abstract

Although representations of the everyday and the familiar, as distinct from the extraordinary and the exotic, are as old as art itself, the term ‘realism’ to identify these does not seem to have been used in English until 1856. In that year, coincidentally the same that Flaubert shocked the French public and authorities with his anti-romantic ‘scenes from provincial life’ in Madame Bovary , George Eliot extended Ruskin’s use of ‘realism’ in Modern Painters to literature that presented social life with meticulous attention to detail, and in the United States Emerson used the word to describe Swift’s style. As a reaction against the romanticism of the earlier nineteenth century, realism—or a range of realistic subjects and styles- came to characterise new developments in fiction (and later drama) in Europe, the United States and, by the last decades of the century, when a new generation of predominantly native-born writers emerged, Australia.

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