<p><strong>Noun:</strong></p><ul><li>interest in or concern for the actual or real, as distinguished from the abstract, speculative, etc.</li><li>the tendency to view or represent things as they really are.</li><li>Fine Arts: treatment of forms, colors, space, etc., in such a manner as to emphasize their correspondence to actuality or to ordinary visual experience.</li><li>Compare idealism (def 4), naturalism (def 2).</li><li>(usually initial capital letter) a style of painting and sculpture developed about the mid-19th century in which figures and scenes are depicted as they are experienced or might be experienced in everyday life.</li><li>Literature: a manner of treating subject matter that presents a careful description of everyday life, usually of the lower and middle classes.</li><li>a theory of writing in which the ordinary, familiar, or mundane aspects of life are represented in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner that is presumed to reflect life as it actually is.</li><li>Compare naturalism (def 1b).</li><li>Philosophy: the doctrine that universals have a real objective existence.</li><li>Compare conceptualism, nominalism.</li><li>the doctrine that objects of sense perception have an existence independent of the act of perception.</li><li>Compare idealism (def 5a).</li></ul>