Realism was deliberately sought by such writers as George Eliot and other Victorian chroniclers of unremarkable, middle-class life. A more self-conscious form of realism is naturalism, associated especially with the novels of Zola and the plays of Ibsen, writers who were influenced by Darwinianism, and who consequently sought a materialistic explanation of character.
Modern criticism tends to stress the way in which the appearance of reality is itself a careful construct, in which the narrator assumes a community of interest with the reader, and thus allows the narrative to become transparent, much in the way that most film-goers are unaware of the careful artifice of the camera as it zooms in on the realistic detail of the ketchup-laced body (as a result of the meticulous editing of the successful take 21).