Realism is a literary mode that aims to represent ordinary life and familiar things with accuracy and without idealization. It emerged as a dominant tendency in the nineteenth century.

Realist writers such as Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, and Tolstoy focused on middle- and working-class characters, social detail, and the consequences of ordinary choices. The style tends toward plain prose, careful observation, and an avoidance of melodrama or overt authorial intrusion. Plot arises from character and circumstance rather than from coincidence or divine intervention. The claim is not that the fiction is factual, but that it is faithful to the textures and probabilities of lived experience.

Realism has been challenged by modernist and postmodernist experiments, yet it remains a powerful and popular mode. Contemporary fiction still draws on its techniques even when it mixes them with other approaches. The realist impulse continues wherever writers try to make the invented world feel continuous with the reader’s own.

Fiction that seeks to portray ordinary experience without romantic heightening belongs to the realist tradition.