The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

110

TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)

Glossary

LOOKING BACK

110 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style

110

Realism in the Visual Arts

• By the mid nineteenth century the camera was used to
  document all aspects of contemporary life as well as to provide
  artists with detailed visual data.


• In painting, Courbet led the Realist movement with canvases
  depicting the activities of humble and commonplace men and
  women. Daumier employed the new technique of lithography
  to show his deep concern for political and social conditions in
  rapidly modernizing France.
  •With the landmark paintings Déjeuner sur l’herbeand Olympia,
  Edouard Manet shocked public taste by modernizing Classical
  subjects and violating conventional painting techniques.


• American Realism is best represented by the trompe l’oeil
  paintings of William Harnett and the down-to-earth subjects
  of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer.

Late Nineteenth-Century Architecture

• Paxton’s Crystal Palace, the world’s first prefabricated cast-iron
  structure, offered a prophetic glimpse into the decades that
  would produce steel-framed skyscrapers.


• In an age of advancing industrialization, ornamental structures
  such as the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower gave way to
  functional ones. Inevitably, the skyscraper would become the
  prime architectural expression of modern corporate power and
  the urban scene.

Realism in Music

• Verismoopera departed from Romantic tradition by seeking
  to capture the lives of men and women with a truth to nature
  comparable to that of Realist novels and paintings.


• In the opera Madame Butterfly, the Italian “verist” Giacomo
  Puccini presented a timely view of America’s imperialistic
  presence in Asia.

The Global Dominion of the West

• During the second half of the nineteenth century, as Western
  industrialization accelerated, Realism came to rival Romanticism
  both as a style and as an attitude of mind.


• Western industrialization and the materialistic values with which
  it was allied precipitated imperialism and colonialism, both of
  which had a shaping influence on the non-Western world. The
  heavy hand of Western imperialism in some parts of Africa, Asia,
  and in the Middle East had a crippling effect on independent
  growth and productivity.

Nineteenth-Century Social Theory

• The ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, utilitarianism, and
  socialism offered varying solutions to nineteenth-century social
  and economic inequities. Marxist communism called for violent
  proletarian revolution that would end private ownership of the
  means of economic production.


• The leading proponent of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, defended
  the exercise of individual liberty as protected by the state.
  •Mill’s opposition to the subordination of women gave strong
  support to nineteenth-century movements for women’s rights.

Realism in Literature

• In literature, Realism emerged as a style concerned with
  recording contemporary subject matter in true-to-life terms.


• Such novelists as Dickens in England, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy
  in Russia, Flaubert and Zola in France, and Twain and Chopin
  in America described contemporary social conditions
  sympathetically and with fidelity to detail.


• Flaubert and Chopin provided alternatives to Romantic idealism
  in their realistic characterizations of female figures.


• Zola’s naturalistic novels pictured human beings as determined by
  hereditary and sociological factors, while Ibsen’s fearless portrayal
  of class and gender opened a new chapter in modern drama.

capitalistone who

provides investment capital

in economic ventures

entrepreneurone who

organizes, manages, and

assumes the risks of a business

lithographya printmaking

process created by drawing on

a stone plate; see Figure 30.13

proletariata collective term

describing industrial workers

who lack their own means of

production and hence sell their

labor to live

verismo(Italian, “realism”)

a type of late nineteenth-century

opera that presents a realistic

picture of life, instead of a story

based in myth, legend, or

ancient history