Core essay. Routes into realism

Abstract

This chapter reassesses and remaps the emergence of realist poetics and style in English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish literature in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, i.e., mostly before the French and German theories and critical debates about realism of the 1850s. Focusing largely on the novel and the novella, but also considering short prose and poetry, the chapter analyzes the often neglected role of Enlightenment legacies in the rise of realism (sentimentalism, the family novel, the romance), questions conventional periodization by exploring the development of realist themes and techniques in the context of romanticism and the historical novel (including the historical novel of the present), and pioneers the analysis of different forms of short prose as catalysts of realist representation and style. Two further sections are devoted to the profile of early realism (proto-realism) in criticism and literary practice, whose disruptions and experiments are often at odds with later realist theory, and to the language and style of realist narrative. The chapter’s comparative approach highlights the common ground between the multiple beginnings of realism in the different languages and the role of cross-cultural literary resonances, translations, analogies and dialogues but also the asynchronicity and specificity of national variations.