Realism and Modernism: Victorian Era to 1930s

Posted on Jan 6, 2025 in English Studies

Realism in the Victorian Age

• Realism is a movement that supports the representation of reality in a concrete and accurate depiction of human life. Realism intended to reflect reality as it is.
• This fact is the product and expression of the mood of this time. This movement developed from the mid to late 19th century.
• It broke with the fantasies and the idealism of Romanticism. It was created due to social and political changes taking place in the 19th century.
• Also, during this century, there were some important scientific and industrial advances, such as the railway.
• During Realism, human values and fate create the context of the studies of environment, motivation, circumstance, and temporality.
• This movement appears in a world where spiritual presence did not have much significance.
• The thought of this moment is empirical because it is based on experience, and it is a materialist world.
• This phenomenon appeared at a moment when there were rapid sociological changes when the context began to give importance to individual formation.
• Some critics said Realism in literature reflects a social reality because reality is the only source of inspiration, and it is objective; only the real has interest for Realism. This social reality can serve as a model of the work of art because the realist gives a complete and objective explanation about the observed social reality. For this reason, the realist can discover the principles governing social change.
• Realism is faithful to our experience of life lived in a physical and social environment because it is based on experience and reality; for this, Realism is governed by causes and effects. Realism is a reflection of the writer’s experience.
• The language we speak in our ordinary life is the same that we can find in Realism.

Modernism: A Shift from Realism

• ‘Modernism’ is the name given to the movement that dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the 20th century.
• Modernism was that earthquake in the arts that brought down much of the structure of pre-twentieth-century art.
• The most fundamental elements of practice were challenged and rejected. In literature, for example, there was a rejection of traditional realism (chronological plots, continuous narratives related by omniscient narrators, ‘closed endings’, etc.) in favor of experimental forms of various kinds.
• The period of high modernism was the twenty years from 1910 to 1930, and some of the literary ‘high priests’ of the movement (writing in English) were T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein, and (writing in French or German) Marcel Proust, Stéphane Mallarmé, André Gide, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
• New emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity, that is, on how we see rather than what we see (a preoccupation evident in the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique).
• A movement in novels away from the apparent objectivity provided by such features as omniscient external narration, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions.
• A blurring of the distinctions between genres so that novels tend to become more lyrical and poetic, for instance, and poems more documentary and prose-like.
• A new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuous narrative, and random-seeming collages of disparate materials.
• A tendency towards ‘reflexivity’, so that poems, plays, and novels raise issues concerning their nature, status, and role.
• Literature that seems dedicated to experimentation and innovation.