The Novel in Realism
You can't talk about Realism without talking about the novel. The novel is the one genre that is most closely associated with the rise of Realism as a movement: if we tick off on your fingers the most famous works of Realist literature, you'll probably come up with the titles of a bunch of novels, like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, The Brothers Karamazov, and so on.
Realist writers do write in other genres, too, but it's the novel that is at the heart of the Realist tradition. Realist writers were drawn to the novel for several reasons, but most of all, the novel is big, and it's flexible. Realism is all about detail, after all, and you can fit a whole lot more detail into 300—or 1,300—pages of writing than you can fit into the fourteen lines of a sonnet.
The novel also gives you space to talk about loads of different issues and different characters. In Tolstoy's gigantic novel War and Peace, for example, there are over 500 different characters. That's like having all of your Facebook friends covered in one single book. Do you even know all of your Facebook friends? Tolstoy sure does.
Chew on This
Want to see one of the greatest Victorian novelists in action? Check out Charles Dickens's Great Expectations here.
How about delving into one of the longest works of Realism ever written? Yup, it's Tolstoy's War and Peace.