Balzac is widely credited with being one of the founders of Realism. During his lifetime, he undertook a gigantic project, which he called La Comédie humaine, or The Human Comedy. It's series of n...

If Balzac was one of the founders of the Realist movement, then it was Gustave Flaubert who perfected Realism as an art form in France. Flaubert is especially known for honing the use of detail in...

We can't talk about Realism without talking about Leo Tolstoy. Why? Because he wrote two of the greatest works of Realism… ever: War and Peace and Anna Karenina.Tolstoy was a Russian aristocrat w...

George Eliot—surprise, surprise—was actually a woman named Mary Ann Evans who published under a male pen name so that her work would be taken more seriously. She was one of the most important E...

While George Eliot focused on life in the country, Charles Dickens focused on life in the city. He's famous for providing a view of English society across a spectrum of classes, from the very poor...