Nineteenth-Century Definitions of Realism

►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. In short, realism reveals.  Where we thought nothing worth of notice, it shows everything  to be rife with significance. George Parsons Lathrop, 'The Novel and its Future," Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874): 313‑24.