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realism
In the visual arts, an aesthetic that promotes accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favor of close observation of outward appearances. It was a dominant current in French art between 1850 and 1880. In the early 1830s, the painters of the Barbizon school espoused realism in their faithful reproduction of the landscape near their village. G. Courbet was the first artist to proclaim and practice the realist aesthetic; his Burial at Ornans and The Stone Breakers (1849) shocked the public and critics with their frank depiction of peasants and laborers. In his satirical caricatures, H. Daumier used an energetic linear style and bold detail to criticize the immorality he saw in French society. Realism emerged in the U.S. in the work of W. Homer and T. Eakins. In the 20th cent., German artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit worked in a realist style to express their disillusionment after World War I. The Depression-era movement known as Social Realism adopted a similarly harsh realism to depict the injustices of U.S. society. See also naturalism.

In literature, the theory or practice of fidelity to nature or to real life and to accurate representation without idealization of everyday life. The 18th-cent. works of D. Defoe, H. Fielding, and T. Smollett are among the earliest examples of realism in English literature. It was consciously adopted as an aesthetic program in the mid-19th cent. in France, when interest arose in recording previously ignored aspects of contemporary life and society; G. Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) established the movement in European literature. The realist emphasis on detachment and objectivity, along with lucid but restrained social criticism, became integral to the novel in the late 19th cent. The word has also been used critically to denote excessive minuteness of detail or preoccupation with trivial, sordid, or squalid subjects. See also naturalism.

In philosophy, any viewpoint that accords to the objects of human's knowledge an existence that is independent of whether they are perceiving or thinking about them. Against nominalism, which denies that universals have any reality at all (except as words), and conceptualism, which grants universals reality only as concepts within the mind, realism asserts that universals exist independently of their being expressed in language and conceived by human minds. Against idealism and phenomenalism, it asserts that the existence of material objects and their qualities is independent of their being perceived. Similarly, moral realism asserts that moral qualities of actions (such as being morally good, bad, or indifferent, or being ethically right, wrong, or obligatory) belong to the actions themselves and are not to be explained as mere products of a mind that perceives and feels attracted to or repelled by the actions. In opposition to conventionalism, realism ...

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