Finding full-text articles is easy with LibKey and BrowZine! Click the icons below to begin.
For more information about these tools, visit our LibKey guide.
LibKey Nomad is a browser extension that connects to full-text articles while you search online.
LibKey.io is a simple search interface that finds full-text articles with just a DOI.
BrowZine is a highly visual and intuitive platform that allows you to explore our scholarly journal collection.
realism, in philosophy, the viewpoint which accords to things which are known or perceived an existence or nature which is independent of whether anyone is thinking about or perceiving them.
In application to matters of ontology, realism is standardly applied to doctrines which assert the existence of entities of some problematic or controversial kind. Even under this more restricted heading, however, realism and opposition to it have taken significantly different forms.
Other American writers toward the close of the 19th century moved toward naturalism, a more advanced stage of realism. Hamlin Garland’s writings exemplified some aspects of this development when he made short stories and novels vehicles for philosophical and social preachments and was franker than Howells in stressing the harsher details of the farmer’s struggles and in treating the subject of sex. Main-Travelled Roads (1891) and Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895) displayed Garland’s particular talents. These and a critical manifesto for the new fiction, Crumbling Idols (1894), were influential contributions to a developing movement.
Other American authors of the same period or slightly later were avowed followers of French naturalists led by Émile Zola. Theodore Dreiser, for instance, treated subjects that had seemed too daring to earlier realists and, like other Naturalists, illustrated his own beliefs by his depictions of characters and unfolding of plots. Holding that men’s deeds were “chemical compulsions,” he showed characters unable to direct their actions. Holding also that “the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong,” he showed characters defeated by stronger and more ruthless opponents. His major books included Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and—much later—An American Tragedy (1925).
Works Cited
"American literature." Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 18 Feb. 2025. academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/American-literature/106081. Accessed 6 Mar. 2025.
"Realism." Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 19 Nov. 2020. academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/realism/108671. Accessed 6 Mar. 2025.
The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar by 
The Complete Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer by 
