In the eighteenth century, in the period leading up to the French Revolution, which brought about the final collapse of the economic and ideological structure of feudalism, realism took a great step forward, from the depiction of everyday life and manners to depiction of social existence.
The works of the early realist writers, great and small writers like Richardson, Defoe, Smollett, Fielding, Swift, Steele, Diderot, Goethe, Lessing, Mersier and Marivaux, and many, many others-enable us to determine the essential characteristic feature of the new method, the fundamental distinction between it and all other literary movements.
The essence of realism was social analysis, the study and depiction of the life of man in society, of social relations, the relationship between the individual and society, and the structure of society itself.
Realism took the content of all art and literature depiction of the world and human thoughts and feelings and made it a principle, thereby rising above the flat and copying of reality and subjective presentation of human nature as a playground of unbridled passions. Realism does not arbitrarily isolate man from the social environment in which he lives and acts, but instead sets out to perceive and portray the dialectic of social relationships with their real contradictions. The essence of realism enables the writer or artist to discern life's essential features and approach an understanding of its laws. The more closely the realist scrutinizes reality and investigates the connections between the events his work describes, the more convincing his reproduction of reality is, for he has not only perceived it emotionally, but has interpreted it and generalized it as well.
The intellectual element that permeates realist works requires that the writer has a definite explicit view of life, for generalization of life and people as they really are is impossible if the writer offers a surrogate for reality or treats the sense and substance of the events and phenomena he is examining in an arbitrary, subjective manner.
