novels, plays and poetry, just as they were. Literary conventions with only an imaginative connection to reality were shunned. The goal of writing was to capture the raw material of life in all of its messy details. This new method of writing, called Realism, soon became the fashion, and began to eclipse Romanticism by the 1890s.
One of the central figures in the development of this new style was the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The year 1892 saw the first production of IbsenÆs Hedda Gabler, a story about a middle-class adulteress who commits suicide. Themes such as this had obviously been dealt with before, as far back as the Greeks. Ibsen, however, put these themes in the drawing rooms of Oslo. His realistic dramas made it clear to the audience that such shocking occurrences were not limited to the idealized past and, in fact, were likely taking place in the house next door, if not under oneÆs own roof.
RussiaÆs Anton Chekhov was also writing at this time, creating works for the Moscow Art Theater that depicted the Russian landed gentry without the sentimental distortion that had characterized previous Russian literature. ChekhovÆs characters are filled with the longings, frustrations, and failures of common people. Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear were being replaced on stage by gardeners, schoolteachers, and country doctors. Other playwrights sounding the death knell of Romanticism at the turn of the century included George Bernard Shaw and August Strindberg.
This phenomenon was also taking place in poetry. William Butler Yeats, generally considered the last Romantic and the first Modernist poet, severely changed his poetic style from 1890 through 1910. His early works were devoted to establishing what he called the ôCeltic Twilightö. YeatsÆs poems of this time are overwhelmingly concerned with recapturing an idealized, heroic Ireland. The substance of the poems is largely taken from mythology and folklore, us...