Nineteenth-Century
Definitions of Realism
Realism is “that which does not
shrink from the commonplace
(although art dreads the commonplace)
or from the unpleasant (although the aim
of art is to give pleasure) in its effort to depict things as they are, life as it is” (229) and is used “in opposition to conventionalism, to idealism, to the imaginative, and to sentimentalism” (222). Bliss Perry