This book offers a synthetic overview of the major events, ideas, and individuals that combined to generate the various types of “realistic” expression and determine their fate in the marketplace of taste between the mid-19th century and the end of the First World War. This book uses a wider lens to survey the landscape of realism and map its essential features and overlapping boundaries. The book does not offer any startling new thesis about realism as a conceptual or aesthetic category. No overarching interpretation can adequately encompass the diverse motives and methods associated with...

This book offers a synthetic overview of the major events, ideas, and individuals that combined to generate the various types of “realistic” expression and determine their fate in the marketplace of taste between the mid-19th century and the end of the First World War. This book uses a wider lens to survey the landscape of realism and map its essential features and overlapping boundaries. The book does not offer any startling new thesis about realism as a conceptual or aesthetic category. No overarching interpretation can adequately encompass the diverse motives and methods associated with the realistic impulse. Instead it uses the era's preoccupation with “facing facts” as an organizing frame within which to examine the emergence of various realistic sensibilities in the natural sciences and social sciences, philosophy, literature, art, and architecture.