Mrs. Warren’s Profession | Historical Context

Realism
In the late nineteenth century, playwrights turned away from what they considered the artificiality of melodrama and the contrived structure of ‘‘the wellmade 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...

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