What's the verdict on literary realism...

realism's been dead for a century, subjectivity's the name of the game

Realist doesn't mean objective.

Realism (along with naturalism), as commonly understood, being most prevalent in the second half of the 19th century, produced far less interesting works than the romantic period before it and the experimental modernist period after. It was a product of its time and representative of urbanization and increased contact between people and increased female readership and thus emotionality and Victorian morality, but things changed fast after that. Dickens and Austen etc. are hard to read today unless you really want to bask in that frame of time. Which many do.

>Austen
>after romanticism

Austen is far more realist than romanticist even if her works preceeded it. She typifies it.

duh

>experimental modernist
>good

Think it produced more lasting works and is worthy of more praise stylistically than realism. I agree that was kind of the beginning of the end though, the slip into nihilism and literature as transgressive and judaic.

Perhaps. We'll see in 40-50 years who's who. It feels like all this experimentalism really set the bar too high and too low at the same time - it become too easy to write pretentious crap and slap experiment sticker on it.

what do you have in mind

But seriously, it is retarded. I don't think any other culture has the fiction-nonfiction classification as the central one in literature. And then you get the statements such as OP's.

The effects of realist writing are just more subtle than romanticism or modernism, so it's easier to neglect them and underrate the whole period.
>It was a product of its time
And? That applies to every literary era, including the ones you prefer.
>increased female readership and thus emotionality
The readership of novels was already being built back in the 18th century, and greatly amplified emotionality was in fact brought onto the scene by romanticism. Remember the almost absurd melodrama of early Goethe and Schiller. Realism is far more marked by objectivity and an impassive view of the theme. Writers like Flaubert, Turgenev and Tolstoy are probably the most constrained writers ever.
And it's funny how you talk about the "victorian morality", as if England was the central place for realism, even though France and Russia contributed much more important works. Your view of the era isn't very objective.
That you find a greater gap between your interests and those of realism than those of modernism and romanticism says about you as much as it says about those styles.

How many cultures do you speak?

bout tree fiddy

Wow.