Entertainment / Literature / Psychological Realism: The sense that characters in fictional narratives have realistic 'interiority' or complex emotional and intellectual depth, including perhaps subconscious urges and fears they are not aware of. On an outward level, this realism typically involves reacting to external characters and situations in a manner consistent with the expectations of readers (verisimilitude). On an internal level, it may involve the revelation of characters' thoughts and internal meditations about themselves and others. Such internal machinations are a standard part of Elizabethan drama in the form of the soliloquy. However, psychological realism is associated most closely with the movement toward 'realism' and 'naturalism' in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. After psychoanalysis appeared, Freudian ideas influenced many writers who sought to incorporate his theories into their own depictions of characters. Whether or not we can speak of psychological realism in literary works before the Renaissance is a thorny issue. Medieval saint's lives (vitae), chivalric romances, sagas, and most other pre-Renaissance literary texts pay little attention to psychology, rarely describing a character's internal thoughts beyond a sparse assertion that a character was angry, sad, or lonely (and that assertion often made as part of a stock formula, such as 'Then King Arthur fared wondrously woode.') Often ancient works are so focused on allegory to the exclusion of psychology that some critics assert pre-Renaissance writers and readers had very little sense of interiority or any unique 'self' apart from tribe, family, religious caste, occupation, or social standing. The difference is so marked that some scholars like Harold Bloom speak of 'the invention of the human' in the Renaissance. On the other hand, it is difficult to read something like The Confessions of Saint Augustine without getting a sense of a real human being intensely aware of his own psychology. Possibly, the difference is rooted in conventions of literature rather than any actual historical change in human self-awareness, but the debate continues.
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Psychological Adjective Synonyms: mental, intellectual, cerebral, cognitive, psychic(al), spiritual, subjective, subconscious, unconscious, subliminal, psychogenic, philosophic(al)
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Entertainment / Literature / Realism: An elastic and ambiguous term with two meanings. (1) First, it refers generally to any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conven MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Social Realism: In literature, a branch of realism, especially significant in Russian writing, that focuses on the lives of middle and lower class characters (see realism). At its worst, the movement becomes mere pro MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Surrealism: An artistic movement doing away with the restrictions of realism and verisimilitude that might be imposed on an artist. In this movement, the artist sought to do away with conscious control and instea MORE