Course 2—Lecture - 6

How the Novel Got Its Groove

Fiction moved away from romances and evolved into "realism." Realist fiction depicts a more realistic view of life, by mimicking the way life looks and feels, especially for the middle class.

Literary Realism reached its highpoint in the mid- to late-19th century with writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and early Henry James.

Note: Writers such as Emily Bronte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville are considered part of the Romantic era, which overlapped with Realism. Later writers like Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce are referred to as Modernists, a movement of the late 1900s, which flourished after World War I.