Realism

In the late nineteenth century, playwrights turned away from what they considered the artificiality of melodrama and the contrived structure of "the well-made play," with its slavish devotion to plot and lack of character development, to a focus on the commonplace in the context of everyday contemporary life. They rejected the flat characterizations and unmotivated actions typical of these earlier forms. Their work, along with much of the experimental fiction written during that period, adopts the tenets of realism, a new literary movement that took a serious look at believable characters and their sometimes-problematic interactions with society. In order to accomplish this goal, realistic drama focuses on the commonplace and eliminates the unlikely coincidences and excessive emotionalism of melodrama. Dramatists like Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw discard traditional sentimental theatrical forms as they chronicle the strengths and weaknesses of ordinary people confronting difficult social problems, like...