Realism is a literary trend of thought that first appeared in France, Britain and other places in western Europe in the 1930s and 40s of19th century, and then spread to Russia, northern Europe and the United States, becoming the mainstream of European and American literature in19th century. Realistic literature is the product of the establishment and development of the capitalist system in western Europe. The trend of thought of realistic literature in the19th century came into being under the specific social and historical background and spiritual and cultural conditions. Its artistic features mainly include four points (see pages 228 -230):
First of all, realistic literature pursues the real mode of art and emphasizes the objective and true reflection of life. Realistic writers regard literature as a means to study society and describe the history of social customs, so they attach great importance to the objective authenticity of artistic description, and think that writers should "truthfully reflect life", make the text content of their works isomorphic with the real life content, and make literature have the accuracy of scientific truth. In order to achieve the real artistic effect, realistic writers oppose the expression of "self" in their works, but let the author's thoughts and emotions naturally emerge in the specific plot description and characterization, so that literature can show mirror-like loyalty to life. Realistic writers attach great importance to the truth of details in order to truly describe life. In order to achieve the truth of details, they often do not hesitate to conduct on-the-spot investigations and collect a large number of accurate factual materials. The creative practice of realistic writers shows that "describing life truthfully" is only an artistic ideal under a specific cultural background; The life reflected by excellent realistic literature reflects the writers' feelings, experiences and evaluations of life, and shows the evolution of their emotions and moods in a specific torrent of life. Therefore, these works provide a distorted picture of life that combines the writer's subjective feelings and personality characteristics, rather than a mechanical imitation of life.
Secondly, realistic literature attaches importance to describing the relationship between man and social environment and portraying typical characters in typical environments. Realistic writers accept the influence of natural science and materialist philosophy and think that man is the product of social environment. In their creation, they advocate portraying characters' personalities from their social and historical environment, truly revealing the internal relations, essential characteristics and development trends of characters and events, and fully and truly showing real life and its essential characteristics and reflecting the features of the whole era by describing the formation process of typical characters in typical environments. Under the guidance of the concrete expression of realistic truth view in characterization, the characters in realistic literature are usually very close to life and have strong generality. They are often the embodiment of a certain spirit of the times, which shows the ups and downs of social history. Their thoughts, personalities, emotions and psychology are often as rich and complicated as people in life. Realistic literature has greatly surpassed the previous western literature in characterization and created a series of immortal typical images for the history of world literature.
Thirdly, realistic literature has two tendencies: introversion and extroversion. Realism emphasizes the true reflection of life. Husserl said: "The world is both a psychological field and a physical field." People's social life is a double combination of the external world (physical field) and the internal world (psychological field). Due to the differences in aesthetic psychological mechanism and artistic thinking mode, realistic writers focus on the artistic grasp of the external world and the inner world when truly reflecting life. These two tendencies are often combined in the creation of different writers, rather than opposing each other. For example, Tolstoy combined extroversion and introversion, and Balzac combined extroversion and introversion. Therefore, the achievement of realism is not only reflected in the vastness of external social life, but also in the profundity of internal spiritual world. Along the extroversion and introversion,19th century realism communicated with 20th century literature.
Fourth, realism is dominated by narrative literature, and novel creation, especially novels, has matured and prospered. Under the influence of scientism, writers in the19th century tried to study and analyze society through literary creation, and society also required literature to truly reflect life and answer a series of questions raised by the times and life. Under this spiritual and cultural condition, narrative novels have obvious advantages in survival and development than lyric poems. Realistic novels are usually social novels that extensively summarize and analyze real life. Under the guidance of scientific consciousness and historical consciousness, they fully reflect the life customs of the whole era and all walks of life, and truly show complex historical events and social and historical prospects. With the joint efforts of writers, realistic novels in the19th century are more mature than previous novels in narrative art, plot structure and character description, and become the most important art form in this period with unprecedented brilliant achievements.