The general European paradigm shift from “past to peasant”, noticeable in a number of cultural fields, also affected the novel. The historical novel declined in the generations after Scott, surviving largely among less prestigious readerships: the popular classes, children and women. Its place in the field of narrative fiction was taken by what is generally known as the Realist novel; it dominated literary production during the second half of the 19th century and continued as a mainstream staple alongside more Modernist experiments during the 20th. Some aspects of Romantic Nationalism survive, and find expression, in literary Realism and Naturalism.
To some extent the rise of Realism can be situated in the general shifts that occurred within the literary system: the emergence of a new, larger readership also including less affluent classes and the rising dominance of bourgeois values in literary taste; circulation of reading material through public libraries, book clubs and in the form of romans-feuilleton published in periodical instalments. The exoticism of bygone periods and distant lands turned inwards and thematized colourful social classes such as the rural peasantry, the ultra-refined aristocracy (“silver fork novels”) and the urban poor (Dickens; Eugène Sue; Les Misérables); Alexandre Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte-Cristo combined all of these, as did the novellas of Prosper Mérimée. The “realism” of these novels and tales (heavily cargoed as they were with local colour, sensational incidents and eccentric characters) should be seen not as a factual fidelity to mundane everyday experiences, but rather as an attempt to locate the interest of the action in something that was familiar to readers at the time: tense social relations, the dangers of poverty and injustice, the problems of modern life.
Rustic realism, in countryside settings, took over from the historical novel as the premier genre for articulating the nation’s identity. The peasantry was seen as the timeless, poor but morally upright embodiment of national traditions and national values. Idyllic novels and tales set in distinct regions combined rustic local colour with ideas of ancient, unchanging tradition and rough-hewn, primordial character-types to celebrate the nation’s moral identity. Examples range across Europe: the Heimatroman in Germany and in Switzerland (including Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz for the French-speaking cantons); Alphonse Daudet and Marcol Pagnol for the south of France; various costumbrista novels for the different regions of Spain. Peasant idyll as an unusual but representative adornment of the nation’s identity was also a popular formula in other cultural fields: after folk music had become increasingly important as a stylistic enrichment for classical composers, and folk-dances were habitually drawn upon for opera and ballet interludes and for classical compositions, we see a rise of rustic-dramatic operas like Smetana’s The bartered bride (1866) or Janáček’s Jenůfa. The rise of open-air painting led to a great deal of “peasant types”, which in turn inspired ethnographic photography and the cultivation of traditional dress and design.
Farm-based family sagas became popular in France, Flanders and the Scandinavian world, and were combined with denunciations of foreign oppression in novels ranging from Charles Kickham’s Knocknagow, or The homes of Tipperary to Ivan Vazov’s Under the yoke. The register veered between the sombre (as in Tomas Hardy) to the sentimental (Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, George Sand, Božena Němčová) and the broadly humorous – as in Mór Jókai’s Gypsy baron (turned into a popular operetta for Habsburg audiences) and Ernest Claes; the poetic prototype being perhaps Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz. Later in the century, novelists and playwrights on the whole gave more attention to the socio-economic and moral plight of country people (Synge, Riders to the sea; Heijermans, Op hoop van zegen, 1900).
Indeed, in many cases the interest of Realistic literature was social rather than “national”. Minimally, the intense moralism that dominated the melodramatic contrasts between virtue and wickedness, heroism and victimization, would invoke current national ethnotypes and the wickedness of foreigners. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette turns on the contrast between the moralistic, virtuous (and, as such, Protestant-English) heroine in the morally unsound and emotionally threatening environment of a Francophone-Catholic city. Still, such novels passively reflected, rather than actively propagating, notions of national character. In the fervently nationalist climate of the later 19th century novels could indeed be used as a characterological battleground between nations and ethnicities – e.g. in the opposition between German, Polish and Jewish characters in Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben, or the mystical invocation of Russianness in Dostoevskij and in Tolstoj’s War and peace.
The notion of character had been central to the idea of realism ever since the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics in the 17th century. In the 19th century, this fed into an interest in human “types”, which scholars attempted to classify with markers of an ethnographical, physical or social nature. The tendency of realistic novels to populate their pages with socially representative types formed part of, and reinforced, this tendency; realistic novels relied to a surprising extent on stereotypical stock characters, certainly for the secondary personages. To the extent that these stock characters were held to be nationally representative (“John Bull” squires, fatalistic Russian peasants or choleric Spanish bullfighters, as depicted by Trollope, Tolstoj or Blasco Ibañez), they actively helped to consolidate national self-images among the expanding readership. At the same time, this interacted with non-fictional genres in what, following Walter Benjamin, has been termed the “panoramatic” mode: conspectuses of the English, French or Spanish nation (in Spanish known as costumbrismo), often in a variety of gendered or regionalized sub-types. Benjamin had reflected on the panoramic character of new, proto-cinematographic pictorial spectacles like the diorama and the in-the-round painting, with their total-immersion surveys of a large, spectacular scene. This scopic regime of realism has logical links with 19th-century display culture as also expressed in museums, zoos and botanical gardens.
In literature, the panoramatic nature of such writings illustrates an ambition to encompass all of society in a novelistic ambit. Much as the historical novel intended to give information about the national past in narrative-fictional guise, the social novel proffered its social or moral representations of the nation, often panoramatically concatenated into novel-cycles (Balzac’s Comédie humaine; Zola’s Rougon-Macquart; Trollope’s Barsetshire novels; Hardy’s Wessex novels; Galsworthy’s Forsyte saga; the Dutch Merijntje Gijzen cycle by A.M. de Jong; not to mention the almost proverbial “Scandinavian trilogies”, e.g. Tryggve Gulbransen and Sigrid Undset). Even single novels often worked on a wide social canvas (Middlemarch), tales and sketches were seen as a photographic kaleidoscope of the nation (Hildebrand’s Camera obscura). This kaleidoscopic or episodic nature of such “panoramatic” novelistic productions chimed with a general tendency in the 19th century to create “cluster works” (cycles, galleries, pavilions, open-air museums) of superaccumulated artistic instances (multiple-figure monuments, statues serially arrayed). It also rendered them suitable for publication in instalments or in multiple volumes, and, in the new media of the 20th and 21th century, for TV serialization.
