ABSTRACT
Much of the confusion, as well as the controversy, surrounding discussions of nineteenth-century Realism，comes from the misguided attempts of critics and literary historians to produce a simple definition for what was，in fact, a broad and heterogeneous movement that can only be fully understood when its methods are seen in relation to wider social and philosophical contexts. It is particularly tempting for literary critics to concentrate their attention on method and technique, but even this narrow focus has produced a bewildering multiplicity of emphases and definitions. There are those, for example, who maintain that the documentary rendering of external detail is the primary characteristic of realism, and that the only justification for any statement in a realistic discourse must be its referent. Others reject the particularity inherent in this view in favour of the notion of a realistic ‘norm’，a statistical average which demands that the realist text should aim at representing the typical rather than the unique. Set against these views, or even alongside them, is another that identifies the essential technique of realism not so much in its style as in its narrative method. Objectivity can only be achieved by the elimination of the mediation and manipu lation of the author or his alter ego, the narrator. Novels must seek the impersonality of drama and the impartiality of science before they can be called realistic.
