dirty realism
dirty realism noun: a North American literary movement that depicts seamy or mundane aspects of ordinary life in spare, unadorned language.
Noun
dirty realism (uncountable)
- A North American literary movement that depicts seamy or mundane aspects of ordinary life in spare, unadorned language.
- It was Maryann Burk Carver who won the bread in those early years while Ray drank, fished, went to school and began writing the stories that a generation of critics and teachers would miscategorize as “minimalism” or “dirty realism.”2009 November 20, Stephen King, “Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
Origin of dirty realism
Coined by Bill Buford of Granta magazine in 1983.
Questions about dirty realism
- What does dirty realism mean?
- Dirty realism means a North American literary movement that depicts seamy or mundane aspects of ordinary life in spare, unadorned language.
- What part of speech is dirty realism?
- Dirty realism is a noun.
Words near dirty realism in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: dirty realism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “dirty realism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dirty_realism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.