Realist and Naturalist Movements

Late nineteenth-century movements built on the close, unsentimental observation of ordinary life: realism's fidelity to everyday experience and naturalism's extension of that fidelity into deterministic, near-scientific studies of environment and heredity. Belongs here: a movement defined by rejection of romantic idealism in favor of observed fact. Does not belong here: symbolism and aestheticism, contemporaneous movements that reacted against realism from the opposite direction, tracked under their own group below.