It is a creative impulse as old as humanity itself: to depict life faithfully, accurately, in words or images. This program shows how that impulse led to Realism - a widespread artistic movement, born in the latter half of the 19th century, which rejected pretense, distortion, and sentimentality. Incorporating interviews with art historians and literary scholars, the program explores the sociopolitical origins of the phenomenon in the 1848 Revolution in France and the concurrent wave of industrialization that swept Europe and America. Luminous images by Édouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, and Honoré Daumier - along with the unflinching writings of Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen - are analyzed and compared with the work of Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, Mark Twain, Jack London, Stephen Crane, and others. The contributions of early photographers and filmmakers, as well as the first stirrings of feminism, are also examined.

Encoded with permission for digital streaming by Infobase on Mar. 06, 2007. Learn360 is distributed by Infobase for Films for the Humanities & Sciences, Cambridge Educational, Meridian Education, and Shopware.

Representing Reality in Art (0:55) -- Realism Mirrors Dynamic Between Upper and Lower Social Classes (3:35) -- Principal Characteristics of 19th Century Realism (4:49) -- Realism's Burial of Romanticism (4:22) -- Father of Literary Realism (3:18) -- Influence of Positivism on Realism (1:24) -- Impact of Photography and Cinematograph on Realism (4:03) -- Birth of Naturalism (2:13) -- Realist Interpretations of Death (2:46) -- Women in Realism (4:11) -- American Realism: Ash Can (5:06) -- Early American Literature (1:28) -- Twentieth Century Realism (1:54) -- Cinematic Realism in the 20th Century (3:48) -- Cultural Transformation at Foundation of 20th Century Art (2:27) -- Dirty Realism (2:58) -- The Future of Realism (2:29) -- Realism's Characteristics (3:12).