Whereas the age of the Romantics valued the exceptional, the genius, and the uncommon individual, the age of Realism values members of the middle class. While the age of the Romantics valued the contribution of the genius and imagination of the writer/poet, the Realists wanted to de-emphasize the contribution of the writer and thought writers should "objectively" see contemporary life as the material for their writing. They attempted to keep themselves as writers from coming between the reader and the life they presented in their art. Also, the age of the Romantics valued the details of the present moment as a way to transcend the moment and the present world, the age of Realism on the other hand values the surface details, the everyday life, and the common conduct of middle class individuals. They do this with the purpose of creating the illusion of reality. Herik Ibsen said that the effect he was seeking in his Realistic plays was to make "t

The inevitably subjective and therefore indeterminate status of reality is powerfully dramatized in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Joyce follows Stephen Dedalus’s developing consciousness of different levels of reality, from the simple sensuous reality of a child’s sensations to the liberated reality of the disengaged imagination. The novel describes a continuous process of dilation, as Stephen is “drawn to go forth to encounter reality”; there is always some further realization at hand that will conduct him to that core of consciousness which is (for him) the ground of the real. Stephen explicitly states he will “fly by those nets’ personal, religious, and national, which would limit his exploration of reality; “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race” (Penguin ed., Harmondsworth, 1968, pp. 159,203,253).

In the eighteenth century, in the period leading up to the French Revolution, which brought about the final collapse of the economic and ideological structure of feudalism, realism took a great step forward, from the depiction of everyday life and manners to depiction of social existence.

Some topics in this essay:
Mersier Marivaux, Middle Ages, Defoe Richardson, According Barthes, Miss Havisham, Russia Americas, Realism Western, Yes That's, Stephen Dedalus’s, Expectations Dickens, realist novel, middle class, romantics valued, age romantics valued, novel form, human experience, formal conventions, ethical choices, eighteenth century, everyday life, age romantics, middle class individuals, individual apprehension reality, previous literary forms,