ABSTRACT
The conscience that awoke to find itself called realism was stirred from the dreams of the romantics by a group of artists in mid-nineteenth-century France. Edmond Duranty expressed the aggressive intentions of realism in announcing ‘what it attacks’, and his own short-lived review, Realisme, contains some of the most vigorous realist polemic. Edmund Gosse said that realism ‘cleared the air of a thousand follies’; Philip Rahv argues that naturalism ‘revolutionized writing by liquidating the last assets of “romance” in fiction and by purging it once and for all of the idealism of the “beautiful lie”’. Naturalism hardened itself by compact with the age, and systematized itself by submitting to the discipline of science. If realism was on the way to becoming in art what positivism was in philosophy, as Ferdinand Brunetiere wrote in Le Roman Naturaliste , then in its naturalist apotheosis it realized the condition.
