Australia In the early nineteenth century, there was growing impetus to establish an Australian culture that was separate from its English Colonial beginnings. Common artistic motifs and characters that were represented in Australian realism were the
Australian Outback, known simply as "the bush", in its harsh and volatile beauty, the British settlers, the
Indigenous Australian, the
squatter and the
digger—although some of these bordered into a more
mythic territory in much of Australia's art scene. A significant portion of Australia's early realism was a rejection of, according to what the
Sydney Bulletin called in 1881 a "romantic identity" of the country. Most of the earliest writing in the colony was not literature in the most recent international sense, but rather journals and documentations of expeditions and environments, although literary style and preconceptions entered into the journal writing. Oftentimes in early Australian literature, romanticism and realism co-existed,
Patrick White's novels
Tree of Man (1955) and
Voss (1957) fared particularly well and in 1973 White was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature. A new kind of literary realism emerged in the late twentieth century, helmed by
Helen Garner's
Monkey Grip (1977) which revolutionised contemporary fiction in Australia, though it has since emerged that the novel was
diaristic and based on Garner's own experiences.
Monkey Grip concerns itself with a single-mother living in a succession of
Melbourne share-houses, as she navigates her increasingly obsessive relationship with a drug addict who drifts in and out of her life. A sub-set of realism emerged in Australia's literary scene known as "dirty realism", typically written by "new, young authors" who examined "gritty, dirty, real existences",
United Kingdom Ian Watt in
The Rise of the Novel (1957) saw the novel as originating in the early 18th-century and he argued that the novel's 'novelty' was its 'formal realism': the idea 'that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience'. His examples are
novelists Daniel Defoe,
Samuel Richardson and
Henry Fielding. Watt argued that the novel's concern with realistically described relations between ordinary individuals, ran parallel to the more general development of philosophical realism, middle-class economic individualism and Puritan individualism. He also claims that the form addressed the interests and capacities of the new middle-class reading public and the new book trade evolving in response to them. As tradesmen themselves, Defoe and Richardson had only to 'consult their own standards' to know that their work would appeal to a large audience. Later in the 19th century
George Eliot's (1819–1880)
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), described by
novelists
Martin Amis and
Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language, is a work of realism. Through the voices and opinions of different characters the reader becomes aware of important issues of the day, including the
Reform Bill of 1832, the beginnings of the railways, and the state of contemporary medical science.
Middlemarch also shows the deeply reactionary mindset within a settled community facing the prospect of what to many is unwelcome social, political and technological change. While
George Gissing (1857–1903), author of
New Grub Street (1891), amongst many other works, has traditionally been viewed as a naturalist, mainly influenced by
Émile Zola, Jacob Korg has suggested that
George Eliot was a greater influence. Other novelists, such as
Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) and
Anglo-Irishman
George Moore (1852–1933), consciously imitated the French realists. Bennett's most famous works are the
Clayhanger trilogy (1910–18) and ''
The Old Wives' Tale (1908). These books draw on his experience of life in the Staffordshire Potteries, an industrial area encompassing the six towns that now make up Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. George Moore, whose most famous work is Esther Waters'' (1894), was also influenced by the
naturalism of Zola.
United States William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was the first American author to bring
a realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States. His stories of middle and upper class life set in the 1880s and 1890s are highly regarded among scholars of American fiction. His most popular novel,
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), depicts a man who, ironically, falls from materialistic fortune by his own mistakes. One of the earliest examples of realism was
Josiah Gilbert Holland’s second novel,
Miss Gilbert’s Career, published “a full decade before any of the so-called pioneer American realistic novelists begin to publish.“ The 1860 novel “anticipated these much abler and more penetrating realists.“ This includes Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), better known by his pen name of
Mark Twain, author of
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and
Stephen Crane (1871–1900). Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm. For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not merely a literary technique: It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions. Crane was primarily a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays. Crane saw life at its rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His haunting
Civil War novel,
The Red Badge of Courage, was published to great acclaim in 1895, but he barely had time to bask in the attention before he died, at 28, having neglected his health. He has enjoyed continued success ever since—as a champion of the common man, a realist, and a symbolist. Crane's
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), is one of the best, if not the earliest, naturalistic American novel. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensitive young girl whose uneducated, alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love, and eager to escape her violent home life, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive but soon dies. Crane's earthy subject matter and his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, earmark Maggie as a naturalist work. Other later American realists are
John Steinbeck,
Frank Norris,
Theodore Dreiser,
Upton Sinclair,
Jack London,
Edith Wharton and
Henry James.
Europe , Spanish writer from the Canary Islands
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is the most prominent representative of 19th-century realism in fiction through the inclusion of specific detail and recurring characters. His
La Comédie humaine, a vast collection of nearly 100 novels, was the most ambitious scheme ever devised by a writer of fiction—nothing less than a complete contemporary history of his countrymen. Realism is also an important aspect of the works of
Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824–1895). Many of the novels in this period, including Balzac's, were published in newspapers in
serial form, and the immensely popular realist "roman feuilleton" tended to specialize in portraying the hidden side of urban life (crime, police spies, criminal slang), as in the novels of
Eugène Sue. Similar tendencies appeared in the theatrical
melodramas of the period and, in an even more lurid and gruesome light, in the
Grand Guignol at the end of the century.
Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872), known today as the "national author of Finland", wrote his only novel
The Seven Brothers (1870), which was strongly influenced by
Cervantes, and which received at time a very negative reception from critics because its contemporary descriptions of the life of a Finnish
peasants in an unadorned realism, long before the work achieved the status of a national novel.
Gustave Flaubert's (1821–1880) acclaimed novels
Madame Bovary (1857), which reveals the tragic consequences of romanticism on the wife of a provincial doctor, and
Sentimental Education (1869) represent perhaps the highest stages in the development of French realism. Flaubert also wrote other works in an entirely different style and his romanticism is apparent in the fantastic
The Temptation of Saint Anthony (final version published 1874) and the baroque and exotic scenes of ancient
Carthage in
Salammbô (1862). In
German literature, 19th-century realism developed under the name of "Poetic Realism" or "Bourgeois Realism," and major figures include
Theodor Fontane,
Gustav Freytag,
Gottfried Keller,
Wilhelm Raabe,
Adalbert Stifter, and
Theodor Storm. In
Italian literature, the realism genre developed a detached description of the social and economic conditions of people in their time and environment. Major figures of Italian
Verismo include
Luigi Capuana,
Giovanni Verga,
Federico De Roberto,
Matilde Serao,
Salvatore Di Giacomo, and
Grazia Deledda, who in 1926 received the
Nobel Prize for Literature. Later realist writers included
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Leo Tolstoy,
Benito Pérez Galdós,
Guy de Maupassant,
Anton Chekhov,
Leopoldo Alas (Clarín),
Machado de Assis,
Eça de Queiroz,
Henryk Sienkiewicz,
Bolesław Prus and, in a sense,
Émile Zola, whose
naturalism is often regarded as an offshoot of realism. ==Realism in the theatre==