ABSTRACT
The realistic and the romantic selections from life are two great divisions of fiction. Realism is an attempt at a complete portrayal of reality; romance is a portrayal of one of the more thrilling and inspiring aspects of reality; much bad literature might well be described as unrealism. A mixture of romance and realism is likely to be more popular today than undiluted romance. The limitation of romance is that it is essentially simple; the moral issue involved has to be one of black versus white, which in our present civilization is not a common contrast. It makes its selection in a different frame of mind; realism seeks to give us knowledge of truth. It is difficult to define reality in literature, as opposed to unreality, but the difference would seem to be in part artistic, in part psychological or moralas with subjectivity and objectivity.
