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