The History and Development of Realism

Realism reached its climax through the development of theorists such as Tainer, Engels, Belinsky and Lukács in the 20th century, and the literary practice of great writers such as Balzac, Dostoevsky, Flaubert and Tolstoy. The theory of realism is becoming more and more perfect, forming a complete set of discourse stereotypes. It includes the following levels of meaning:

First, the true and objective reproduction of social reality, which is the most fundamental meaning of the term realism. Damian Grant used the theory of "conformity" to explain the objectivity of realism, he called conformity as a kind of literary conscientiousness, "If literature neglects or depreciates external reality, and wishes to draw its nourishment only from the wantonness of the imagination, and exists only for the sake of the imagination, this conscientiousness must protest. ." This emphasizes literature's loyalty and responsibility to reality.R. Wellek interprets this meaning in the context of the literary history of Realism against Romanticism: "It excludes vain fancies, excludes mythological stories, excludes allegory and symbolism, excludes high stylization, excludes pure abstraction and carving, and it implies that we have no need of fictions, no need of mythological stories, no need of dream worlds." In this sense, the desire to be true to the true nature of social existence

Secondly, the widely known theory of typology. Typology constitutes a core element of the theory of realism, and in a nutshell, the typical theory seeks to solve the problem of the relationship between the particular and the general of literary characters. Hegel and Schelling laid the aesthetic foundation for the spread of the typical theory, Hegel believed that character is the true center of ideal artistic expression, the reason why a character is of interest is its completeness, and the completeness is "due to the universality of the force represented and the particularity of the individual character are fused together, and in this unity becomes itself united in itself. " According to Wellek's historical tracing, the original user of the term archetypal was Schelling, meaning a figure of great universality like a myth.

Third, the requirement of historicity. For Wellek, historicity is one of the more viable norms of realist theory, and he cites Auerbach's commentary on The Red and the Black to illustrate this point: "The protagonist is 'rooted in a general political, social, and economic reality that is concrete and at the same time evolving' " Wellek is right that realism does have a historical dimension.

The nineteenth-century trend of critical realism was both a historical inheritance and a realistic innovation. It summarized the literary experience before the eighteenth century, supplemented the lack of historical specificity of Renaissance realism, got rid of the rational principle of classicism, and overcame the didactic element of Enlightenment realism and the subjectivity of Romanticism.