Historical realism

Historical realism requires the writer’s critical knowledge of the historicist who has a different interpretation of the historical events. Hegel’s dialectical theory affected many thinkers concerned with social issues. Both realist and modernist writers wanted to reflect the very changes in their societies in their own ways. In that way, history is of great deal to literature and many literary artists preoccupied themselves with historical materials. In the treatment of history, realist writers have accused society, like what the naturalists did, of being the responsible of the confusion and contradiction in which their heroes, often typical for suffering individuals who struggle against the mainstream ideas and wrong, or at least new, beliefs, find themselves. They show us both the environment, factors that affect people and values that dominate the very spirits of the individuals and picture us a typical end they drag themselves to out of their free will which has been affected by what they see and what they come to believe in causing new emergent ideologies and believes that evoke new social formation and raise contradictions as a result of the hegemonic behaviours of the dominant class over the subservient one. Moreover, literary works tend to reflect a specific historical moment that is of great significance to the writer or the world in which he lives.

Wilfred L. Guerin, along with others, as an explanation of what has been said, states that:

Although the historical-biographical approach has been evolving over many years, its basic tenets are perhaps most clearly articulated in the writings of the nineteenth-century French critic H. A. Taine, whose phrase race, milieu, et moment, elaborated in his History of English Literature, bespeaks a heredity and environmental determinism. Put simply, this approach sees a literary work chiefly, if not exclusively, as a reflection of its author’s life and times or the life and times of the characters in the work.17

Far from reflecting what happened to the coming generation, historical novel, which is the best emblem of historical realism, is considered to be good only on the basis of its truth as mentioned in the Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory "though writing fiction, the good historical novelist reaches his or her chosen period thoroughly and strives for verisimilitude".18. Examples of historical novelists are: Balzac, Stendhal and Thomas Mann in Europe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy in Britain.

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