Realism’s Vexed Relations with the Popular

This essay assesses the centrality of popular idioms such as sentimental sympathy (discussed by Faye Halpern’s The Afterlife of Sympathy) and social reform movements (explored in Arielle Zibrak’s Writing Against Reform) to realist era literary productions. While realist writing emerged alongside popular concerns and idioms, its adherents wrestled with the supposed predictability of popular interests, which the era’s authors sought to mitigate by engaging with popular concerns in strategic and limited ways. Realism’s aesthetic goals, long discussed as both fundamental and limiting to the period’s authors, frequently required authors to distance their works from even those reforms that interested them, Zibrak argues, as Writing Against Reform traces the pointed interests of the authors discussed within the study. A similar tension surrounding the popular idiom of sentimental sympathy in Halpern’s work meant that realist writing embraced as well as reshaped the ripple effects of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as attitudes toward sympathy and its methodologies continued to shift. The vision of the realist era emerging from both studies is of a complex, multi-dimensional literary culture deeply attentive to its popular context, and often determined to appear at odds with it.