Word: realism
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...rebellious young intellectuals, it was the resolute opposite of Victorianism. Against Mrs. Grundy's boned corset it set the languid flow of an Aubrey Beardsley tunic. It opposed ice-water morality with the dreggy wine of French "realism." It countered convention with Oscar Wildeish witticisms ("Where is the pleasure of having parents if you may not disobey them"). For common sense it substituted shamelessly overgrown verbiage (" 'Tears, little one,' I said. 'See how they swim like whitebait in the fish-pools of your eyes...
Visiting at a Manhattan Book Fair for children, stage & screen Bogeyman Boris Karloff called for more realism and violence in moppets' books. A diet of namby-pamby stories, he said, gives "the younger generation a completely distorted picture of the world we live in and leaves them totally unequipped to cope with the world's very real problems...
...over half a century, the Western theater has been dominated by the coldly paternal influence of the great Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg-social conscience and psychological drama. This dramatic realism swept the charming Victorian puppets off the stage and replaced them with disagreeable people; it produced excellent playwrights and at least one genius-Shaw. For the paper cutouts of Victorianism it substituted newspaper cutouts, transformed the stage into a lecture platform and the playwright into an amateur reporter, reformer and psychiatrist. The few English-speaking playwrights who attempted metrical dramas usually produced verse as feeble as Maxwell Anderson...
...dead set against the "realism" which demands characters who talk and act "like real people." Says he: "The realistic play is not realistic at all, but just a slice off the top of existence. Writing a realistic play is like meeting a human being for the first time. The realist would observe that this is Mr. So-and-So, that he has a beard and an accent and a mole on his face. But the human being is far more peculiar, something that has gone on since the beginning of time, now miraculously summed up in the strange sort...
Brave Company, by Guthrie Wilson. Rare realism in the story of a World War II infantry company in the line; fiction without the tricks of a fictioneer, by a New Zealander who was there (TIME, Sept...