Theme: critical realism in english literature of the XIX

Critical Realism a trend in modern idealist philosophy that traces its origins back to the critical philosophy of Kant.

The principles that served as a point of departure for critical realism were formulated in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century by A. Riehl, O. Kulpe, and A. Messer, among others. Critical realism was established as an independent school in the USA in 1920, when D. Drake, A. Lovejoy, D. Pratt, A. Rogers, G. Santayana, R. W. Sellars, and C. Strong published their Essays in Critical Realism, a detailed exposition of the doctrine of critical realism. The most essential part of the doctrine is its theory of cognition, in which critical realism opposes itself to new realism: whereas the latter considers the process of knowing the external world to be directly included in consciousness of the subject, to be “seized” by it as it is, critical realism assumes that the process of knowing is mediated by datum, or the content of consciousness.
The problem of the nature of the datum is resolved by critical realists variously. Pratt and Lovejoy identify it with perception. They believe that the datum to a certain extent presents the features of external reality, the knowledge of which allows the subject to orient himself in the world around him. Their views thus come close to the subjective idealist “theory of hieroglyphs.” Santayana, Drake, Strong, and Rogers look upon the datum as an abstract concept, the logical “essence” of a thing, which in the case of correct cognition can coincide with the real essence of the thing. Here ideal essences acquire an ontological character that leads to a new variant of Platonism. Sellars occupies a separate place: he identifies the datum with an adequate reflection in consciousness of the external world and is thus led to a materialist treatment of the process of cognition¹.
The 19th century was characterized by sharp contradictions. In many ways it was an age of progress: railways and ships were built, great scientific discoveries were made, education became more widespread; but al the same time it was an age of profound social unrest, because there was too much poverty, too much injustice. The growth of scientific inventions mechanized industry and increased wealth, but this progress only enriched the few at the expense of the many. Dirty factories, long hours of work, child labour, exploitation, low wages, slums and frequent unemployment -these were the conditions of life for the workers in the growing industries of England, which became the richest country in the world towards the middle of the 19th century.
By the thirties of the 19th century English capitalism had entered a new stage of development. England had become a classical capitalist country, a country of industrial capitalism. The Industrial Revolution gathered force as the 19th century progressed, and profound changes in hand-looms gave way, within a hundred years, to factory towns, railroads, and steamships. The population of Manchester, Birmingham and other industrial centres was growing rapidly as the number of factory workers increased, while the number of poor farmers decreased and many rural districts were depopulated. The basic social classes in England were no longer the peasants and the landlords but the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
Having won the victory over aristocracy, the bourgeoisie betrayed the interests of the working class. The workers fought for their rights. Their political demands were expressed in the People's Charier in 1833. The Chartis Movement was a revolutionary movement of the English workers, which lasted till 1848.
The Chartists introduced their own literature, which was the first attempt to create a literature of the working class. The Chartist writers tried their hand at different genres. They wrote articles, short stories, songs, epigrams, poems. Their leading genre was poetry.
The ideas of the Chartism attracted the attention of many progressive-minded people of that time. A lot of prominent writers became aware of the social injustices around them and tried to depict them in their works. Thus this period was mirrored in literature by the appearance of a new trend, the Critical Realism. The greatest novelists of the age are Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell.
These writers used the novel as a means to protest against the evils in contemporary social and economic life and to picture the world in a realistic way. Their greatness also lies in their profound humanism. Their sympathy lies with the ordinary people. They believed in the good qualities of the human heart.
Literary realism is a literary genre, part of the broader realism in arts, that attempts to represent subject-matter truthfully, avoiding speculative fiction and supernatural elements. It originated with the realist art movement that began with mid-nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal), and Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin).^[1] Literary realism attempts to represent familiar things as they are. Realist authors chose to depict everyday and banal activities and experiences.
Broadly defined as "the representation of reality",^[2] realism in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, as well as implausible, exotic and supernatural elements. Realism has been prevalent in the arts at many periods, and is in large part a matter of technique and training, and the avoidance of stylization. In the visual arts, illusionistic realism is the accurate depiction of lifeforms, perspective, and the details of light and colour. Realist works of art may emphasize the ugly or sordid, such as works of social realism, regionalism, or kitchen sink realism.^[3][4] There have been various realism movements in the arts, such as the opera style of verismo, literary realism, theatrical realism and Italian neorealist cinema. The realism art movement in painting began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution.^[5] The realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century.
Realism as a movement in literature was a post-1848 phenomenon, according to its first theorist Jules-Français Champfleury. It aims to reproduce "objective reality", and focused on showing everyday, quotidian activities and life, primarily among the middle or lower class society, without romantic idealization or dramatization.^[6] It may be regarded as the general attempt to depict subjects as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation and "in accordance with secular, empirical rules."^[7] As such, the approach inherently implies a belief that such reality is ontologically independent of man's conceptual schemes, linguistic practices and beliefs, and thus can be known (or knowable) to the artist, who can in turn represent this 'reality' faithfully. As literary critic Ian Watt states in The Rise of the Novel, modern realism "begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses" and as such "it has its origins in Descartes and Locke, and received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century²."
In the Introduction to The Human Comedy (1842) Balzac "claims that poetic creation and scientific creation are closely related activities, manifesting the tendency of realists towards taking over scientific methods".^[9] The artists of realism used the achievements of contemporary science, the strictness and precision of the scientific method, in order to understand reality. The positivist spirit in science presupposes feeling contempt towards metaphysics, the cult of the fact, experiment and proof, confidence in science and the progress that it brings, as well as striving to give a scientific form to studying social and moral phenomena."^[10]
In the late 18th century Romanticism was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the previous Age of Reason and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature found in the dominant philosophy of the 18th century,^[11] as well as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution.^[12] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,^[13] education^[14] and the natural sciences.^[15]
19th-century realism was in its turn a reaction to Romanticism, and for this reason it is also commonly derogatorily referred as traditional or "bourgeois realism".^[16] However, not all writers of Victorian literature produced works of realism.^[17] The rigidities, conventions, and other limitations of Victorian realism prompted in their turn the revolt of modernism. Starting around 1900, the driving motive of modernist literature was the criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and world view, which was countered with an antirationalist, antirealist and antibourgeois program.
Social Realism[edit]