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.