The 18th-century Enlightenment firmly established the rational capacity of the Europeans. But by the end of the century and into the early part of the 19th century, people began to realize that man is an emotional and organic individual. Therefore, the man of reason became the new man
Generally realism is based on the mode of reproducing reality, while romanticism focuses on emotion and nature and ontological naturalism refers more to reality being limited to the observable world.
Interpretation of Cultural Terms
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Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744 – 1803) 赫尔德：A German philosopher, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang (“狂飙突进”运动), and Weimar Classicism(魏玛古典主义).
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of feeling. By the 1830s and 1840s, the Romantic Movement began to wane, while the trend towards realism started to rise. Realism in fact, as a reaction to romanticism, shared and maintained its focus upon the freedom of the artistic mind. But compared with romanticism, realism puts more value upon the mind and observations of the outside world. Realism emphasizes the truthful and objective representation of reality. In literature, prose fiction, especially the novel, becomes its most often employed means to achieve the goal. Naturalism is the further development of realism in the sense that a naturalistic representation tends more to expose the essence of the object by means of inherent social and environmental factors. Realism preceded impressionism in the 19th century and survived into the 20th century, notably as the social realism of left-wing movements in art and literature.
