Realism

Abstract

While “realism” is usually studied in novels, paintings, or photography, Chapter 2 analyzes realism in the illustrated newspaper, newly invented in 1842. The chapter focuses on reportage of the Crimean War (1853–6), often dubbed the first “media war”: this was the first international conflict to be documented by independent war correspondents, on-the-spot sketch artists, and photojournalists. The chapter argues that the war’s disastrous turns prompted a representational crisis demanding a new visual vocabulary, one that pictorial journalists addressed using four kinds of reality effects. These are designated as the descriptive, the authentic, the everyday, and the plausible, and they are tracked through the Crimean War’s distinctive newspaper imagery, including the trenches, the amputee, the nurse, and “the Valley of Death.” Alongside new journalistic norms, the 1850s also saw the first use of “realism” as a term of literary criticism, reflecting the spread of realist paradigms across media and genres.