1. LITERATURE I
REALISM AND MODERNISM NOVEL
GROUP 4
Lecturer : Mrs. Rani
Arranged by : Dian Andriyani
: Insan Akbar
: Mufadilla Santy
: Reni Yunita Siregar
: Reni Anggraeni
2. Realism Novel
Realism is a literary movement that occurred during 1865-1900. It
focused on giving a view of what was occurring at that time, and on
providing insight into what was really going on in society.
3. Realism Sets Itself
At work to consider characters and events which are apparently the
most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their
full value and true meaning. It would apprehend in all particulars the
connection between the familiar and the extraordinary, and the
seen and unseen of human nature.
From The Novel and Its Future
By: George Parsons Lathrop
4. How did Realism come to be?
grew rapidly after the Civil War, theUnited StatesAs the
of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth inincreasing rates
industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base
due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence
provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in
understanding these rapid shifts in culture.” - (Campless)
5. Characteristics
1. Reaction against Romanticism (A literary movement that focused
around feeling, imagination, and intuition).
2. Realism is situated with truth and depicted life and society as they
were.
3. Focuses mainly on present issues and truths from now rather than
the past or fantasy.
4. Focus is on the characters rather than the actual plot The class of
the characters are important and usually portray the middle or
lower class.
5. Events that occur in the story are predictable because of the lack
of over dramatization and fantasy.
6. Diction is natural (talking, conversational).
6. Opposing Romanticism
1. Springing from a developed outrage to romanticism, realism is
known as the complete opposite, and focuses on ongoing social
issues that should not be disregarded.
2. Realism rejects romantic themes of artificiality and ignorance, and
instead embraces raw life as something beautiful and art worthy.
9. THE NOVEL
DEFINITION
The novel is a long fictional prose narrative.
The novel is differentiated from the novella and the
short story in terms of length.
10. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NOVEL
Antecedents: There are many possible antecedents of
the novel, in Elizabethan prose fiction and the French
heroic romance but probably Miguel Cervantes’s Don
Quixote is considered by many critics as the closest in form
to the novel as known in the modern times.
The 18th century: The novel, as we know it today,
starts in Britain in the 18th century at the hands of such
writers as Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Daniel
Defoe. Pamela, (I, 1740; II, 1741) by Samuel Richardson, is
usually considered the first English novel.
11. The Romantic Novel: During the first half of
19th century, the novel reflected the romantic
spirit of the age, which was characterized by
the return to nature and which valued the
imagination over reason and emotion over
intellect. The Gothic novel was one form of the
romantic novel; it presented horror and the
supernatural.
Major romantic novels include Charlotte
Bronte’s (1816-55) Jane Eyre (1847) and Emily
Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847).
12. The Victorian Novel: The Victorian Age is marked
roughly by the reign of Queen Victoria of England from
1837-1901. The novel was the dominant genre in
the Victorian period. The Victorian novel is
characterized by its realism and its treatment of the
social issues of that period. Charles Dickens (1812-
1870) created a host of unforgettable characters in
such novels as Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David
Copperfield, Hard Times, and A Tale of Two
Cities. William Thackeray's (1811-1863) most famous
work is Vanity Fair. George Eliot's (1819–80) most
important works are Middlemarch, The Mill on the
Floss and Adam Bede. The major novelist of the later
part of the period was Thomas Hardy (1840-1928),
whose best works include Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Far
from the Madding Crowd, and Jude the Obscure.
13. THE MODERN NOVEL
The modern novel is the novel written in the
modern times-the twentieth century and the end
of the nineteenth century. It necessarily reflects
the aspirations, concerns, fears, ways of thinking,
as well as the artistic and literary taste of the
modern era. The modern scientific discoveries, the
new technologies, the social and political
ideologies, the ideas and the beliefs, and people’s
different conceptions about of themselves and
about the universe at large find their way into the
modern novels.
14. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MODERN
NOVEL
The modern novel breaks away with many of the literary
conventions of the novel written in the preceding period.
The modern novel is realistic. It attempts at a presenting a
frank image of the world and all aspects of the human
experience. But the modern novel abandons the realism
of the nineteenth century, in which only the sordid
aspects of life are depicted.
The modern novel is more subjective, presenting the
world from the perspective of the individual character,
reflecting his or her biases or distorted vision. A
relativistic perception of reality replaces the objective
views of the whole community.
Morality is relative.
15. The modern novel is psychological. Under the
influence of the modern theories of Sigmund
Freud, the modern novel tends to reveal the
hidden inner motives behind people’s actions.
The technique of the stream of consciousness
reflects the character’s jumbled flow of
perceptions, memories and feelings.
A break with the linear, developmental, cause-
and-effect presentation of the 'reality‘ and with
the chronological order of the plot mark a large
number of modern novels.
The impact of the two world wars has left its
mark on modern art and literature. A deep sense
of pessimism has replaced the nineteenth-
century optimism.