Realism[精品].doc

《美国文学史》扩充资料第4部分 现实主义与自然主义文学 I. Background Reading（阅读要点） Realism Definition Realism is, in the broadest sense, simply fidelity to actuality in its representation in literature In order to give it more precise definition, however, one needs to limit it to the movement which arose in the nineteenth century, at least partially in reaction against Romanticism, which was centered in the novel, and which was dominant in France, England, and America from roughly mid-century to the closing decade, when it was replaced by Naturalism. In this latter scene, realism defines a literary method, a philosophical and political attitude, and a particular kind of subject matter.?? Realism has been defined as the truthful treatment of material by one of its most vigorous advocates, William Dean Howells, but the statement means little until the realists concept of truth and their selection of materials are designated. Generally, realists are believers in Pragmatism, and the truth they seek to find and express is a relativistic truth, associated with discernible consequences and verifiable by experience. Generally, too, realists are believers in democracy, and the materials they elect to describe are the common, the average, the everyday. Furthermore, realism can be thought of as the ultimate of middle-class art, and it finds its subjects in bourgeois life and manners. Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual to find the scientific laws which control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence.?? Realists espouse what is essentially a Mimetic Theory of Art, centering their attention in the thing imitated and asking for something close to a one-to-one correspondence between the representation and the subject. They usually have, however, a powerful interest in the audience to whom their work is addressed, feeling it to be their