research paper about naturalist literature

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Naturalism and realism.

• Gary Scharnhorst
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.509
• Published online: 26 July 2017

At the most elementary level, realism may be equated with verisimilitude or the approximation of truth. A mimetic artist, the literary realist claims to mirror or represent the world as it objectively appears. Naturalism may be given a trio of thumbnail definitions: pessimistic determinism, stark realism, and realism plus Darwin.

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• > American Literary Naturalism
• > American Naturalism: A Primer

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• Acknowledgments
• Part I General Essays
• Part II Specific Writers and Works
• Part III Donald Pizer and the Study of American Naturalism

1 - American Naturalism: A Primer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2022

From its late nineteenth-century beginnings, critics of American literary naturalism have disagreed, often violently, about its nature and value. Was the movement an exotic offshoot of a decadent French culture or was it a truthful response, after a quarter century of “lying” by an older generation of writers, to the actual conditions of late nineteenth-century American life? Did naturalism posit a human condition in which the individual was a powerless cipher at the mercy of natural forces, including his own animal brutishness, or did it permit the individual to retain at least vestiges of both free will and human dignity? And finally, was naturalism the last gasp of a naive nineteenth-century belief that experience could be objectively represented or did it look forward, in its significant components of the impressionistic and the surreal, to the nonrepresentational aesthetic of twentieth-century literary modernism? These issues have been in dispute for over a century. What is indisputable, however, is that a number of American writers, from approximately the early 1890s to the opening of the First World War, are conventionally identified as “naturalists.” This identification began in their own time either because a writer openly expressed enthusiasm for the work of Emile Zola, the principal theoretician and exponent of French naturalism (Frank Norris, e.g., occasionally playfully signed letters “The Boy Zola”) or because a writer's subject matter of alcoholism, sexual passion, and personal disintegration closely resembled that of Zola (as was true of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser). The term “naturalism,” whether broadly applied to the major new writing of 1890–1910 or used more pointedly to designate the nature of particular works during this period, has stuck, despite the fact that for much of its history the term has also often served as a sign of disapproval and opprobrium. To describe a novel or play as naturalistic was to indirectly accuse its writer of sensationalistic intent, shallow thinking, and inept artistry. Nevertheless, when used with sufficient care and discrimination, the term still serves the useful purpose of suggesting that a group of writers participated in similar ways in a specific cultural moment and that an attempt to describe these ways may cast light both upon their work and the moment.

The leading American naturalists are traditionally held to be Frank Norris (1870–1902), Stephen Crane (1871–1900), and Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945).

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• American Naturalism: A Primer
• Donald Pizer
• Book: American Literary Naturalism
• Online publication: 22 February 2022

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• DOI: 10.1111/J.1741-4113.2011.00819.X
• Corpus ID: 142772337

American Literary Naturalism: Critical Perspectives

• D. Campbell
• Published 1 August 2011
• Literature Compass

11 Citations

Scottish women's writing in the long nineteenth century, scale shifts from polk street to a broken earth; or, literary naturalism's geontological affordances, "so rich a field of romantic incident": disruptive excess in tourgée's a royal gentleman, the aesthetics of the human beast: a comparative study of zola’s l’assommoir, galdós’ la desheredada and crane’s maggie.

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The implications of rural praxes legacies in majorcan urban dance tradition, "deserve got nothing to do with it": black urban experience and the naturalist tradition in the wire, “‘it’s a cu’ous thing ter me, suh’: the distinctive narrative innovation of literary dialect in late-nineteenth century american literature”, chance, positivism, and the arctic in frank norris’s a man’s woman, representing the american dream between frustration and hope in maggie: a girl of the streets and the great gatsby, 2 references, engendering naturalism: narrative form and commodity spectacle in u.s. naturalist fiction, a sense of things, related papers.

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On the Influence of Naturalism on American Literature

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Realism and Naturalism

Introduction, general overviews.

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• In the Context of US History
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Realism and Naturalism by John Dudley LAST REVIEWED: 29 August 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 29 August 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0059

Variously defined as distinct philosophical approaches, complementary aesthetic strategies, or broad literary movements, realism and naturalism emerged as the dominant categories applied to American fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Included under the broad umbrella of realism are a diverse set of authors, including Henry James, W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, George Washington Cable, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Hamlin Garland. Often categorized as regionalists or local colorists, many of these writers produced work that emphasized geographically distinct dialects and customs. Others offered satirical fiction or novels of manners that exposed the excesses, hypocrisies, or shortcomings of a culture undergoing radical social change. A subsequent generation of writers, including Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Jack London, are most often cited as the American inheritors of the naturalist approach practiced by Emile Zola, whose 1880 treatise Le Roman Experimental applied the experimental methods of medical science to the construction of the novel. Governed by a combination of heredity, environment, and chance, the typical characters of naturalist fiction find themselves constrained from achieving the transcendent goals suggested by a false ideology of romantic individualism. Over the past century, critics and literary historians have alternately viewed realist and naturalist texts as explicit condemnations of the economic, cultural, or ethical deficiencies of the industrialized age or as representations of the very ideological forces they purport to critique. Accordingly, an exploration of these texts raises important questions about the relationship between literature and society, and about our understanding of the “real” or the “natural” as cultural and literary phenomena. Though of little regard in the wake of the New Critics’ emphasis on metaphysics and formal innovation, a revived interest in realism as the American adaptation of an international movement aligned with egalitarian and democratic ideology emerged in the 1960s, as did an effort to redefine naturalist fiction as a more complex form belonging to the broader mainstream of American literary history. More recently, the emergence of deconstructive, Marxist, and new historicist criticism in the 1980s afforded a revised, and often skeptical, reevaluation of realism and naturalism as more conflicted forms, itself defined or constructed by hegemonic forces and offering insight into late-19th- and early-20th-century ideologies of class, race, and gender.

In the wake of Parrington’s attempt to reconcile the rise of realism and naturalism with an essentially romantic tradition ( Parrington 1930 ), interest in the rise of these movements has occurred in waves. In particular, efforts to provide large-scale summaries reflect the attention to social problems in 1960s, and the influence of—and reaction to—post-structuralism and cultural criticism in the 1980s. In all cases, however, comprehensive hypotheses about the nature of realism and naturalism remain grounded, to a large extent, in the political, economic, and cultural history of the late 19th century. Berthoff 1965 , Pizer 1984 , and Lehan 2005 represent attempts to accommodate the horizons established by Parrington’s definition of the study of literary form. Kaplan 1988 , Borus 1989 , and Bell 1993 each make valuable contributions to the new historicist reexamination of naturalism. Murphy 1987 offers one of the few comprehensive accounts of realism within dramatic literature.

Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Provides compelling readings of the canonical authors, suggesting little common ground beyond the fact that both realism and naturalism explicitly reject the conventional dictates of artistry and dominant notions of style. Unified in their attraction to “reality” as an abstraction, Howells, Twain, James, Norris, Crane, Dreiser, and Jewett each constructed radically unique responses to a common “revolt against style” (p. 115)

Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919 . New York: Free Press, 1965.

Suggests that realism as a category may be best understood though an examination of practice, rather than through the study of principles or theories. In this light, establishes forceful reading of realist novels as varied statements of outrage and opposition to the increasing materialism, disorder, and perceived moral decay in the years leading up to World War I.

Borus, Daniel H. Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Draws on concerns of new historicism, yet emphasizes the process of literary publication and reception itself. Explores Howells, James, and Norris in detail, with some attention to other writers, including compelling discussions of the publishing industry, literary celebrity, and rise of the political novel.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Includes a concise summary of earlier critical debates about realism (including and subsuming naturalism) and describes the cultural work in novels of Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser to construct social spaces that contain and defuse class tensions emerging in the late 19th century. Among the more influential new historicist interventions.

Lehan, Richard Daniel. Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Resolutely formalist overview of realism and naturalism as literary modes. Describes the philosophical and cultural assumptions that helped shape these movements and traces their development throughout the 20th century. At times polemical in its dismissal of post-structuralist or materialist rereadings (see, for example, Kaplan 1988 ; Howard 1985 or Michaels 1987 , both cited under Philosophy, History, and Form ), nonetheless immensely useful and readable synthesis of key ideas.

Murphy, Brenda. American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

A treatment of realism in American theater, tracing the development of realist ideas about dramatic representation and their subsequent influence on American dramatists of the 20th century, including Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, and others. Addresses the scant attention paid to the theater in the scholarship on realism.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920 . Vol. 3, Main Currents in American Thought . New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930.

Though left incomplete at Parrington’s death, offers what would become the dominant view of realism and naturalism for much subsequent criticism. Sees these movements as antitheses of idealism represented by the Emersonian tradition, providing a needed corrective to “shoddy romanticism” that threatened to consume the American literary tradition.

Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature . Rev. ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Revision of essential 1966 work, offering a comprehensive formal theory of realism and naturalism, linked by adherence to an ethical idealism that informs, restructures, and complicates the diversity of themes and topics, the often bleak subject matter, and the presence of a deterministic worldview. Collects a variety of essays that construct a coherent portrait of the movements and their defining tensions.

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Home › The Naturalism of Émile Zola

The Naturalism of Émile Zola

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on January 8, 2018 • ( 2 )

The novels of the French writer Émile Zola (1840–1902) move toward a more extreme form of realism known as naturalism, taking its name from its allegedly scientific impulse to base its characters, events, and explanations on natural rather than supernatural or divine causes. Perhaps more than any other major literary figure, Émile Zola registered in his fiction and his critical theory the rising tide of scientific advance in the later nineteenth century. Zola was deeply conscious of these movements toward naturalism, toward the restriction of one’s inquiries to the realm of nature (the realm of science, as opposed to the realm of supernature or the supernatural), and he saw naturalistic literature as merely a natural extension and completion of a far broader positivistic movement in recent history.

As such, Zola was the leading figure of French naturalism. He wrote a cycle of twenty novels under the rubric of Les Rougon-Macquart , concerning the two branches of a family, the Rougons and the Macquarts. Zola traced the “natural and social history” of this family through a number of generations, laying emphasis upon their behavior as influenced by heredity and environment. Some of the best known of these novels are L’Assommoir (1877), Nana (1880), and Germinal (1885). Zola’s essay The Experimental Novel (1880) attempted a justification of his own novelistic practice, and became the seminal manifesto of naturalism.

Zola makes it clear at the outset of his essay that the inspiration and foundation of his arguments was Claude Bernard ’s essay Introduction à l’Étude de la Médecine Expérimentale , which had endeavored to show that medicine had a scientific basis, namely, the “experimental method.”1 Bernard had argued that this method, already used in the study of inanimate bodies in physics and chemistry, should also be used in the study of living bodies in the fields of physiology and medicine (2). Essentially, Zola sees Bernard’s attempt as a symptom of a larger pattern of intellectual development: the nineteenth century, he remarks, is marked by a “return to nature,” to natural and scientific explanation of all phenomena. Zola wishes to argue for “a literature governed by science.” He wishes to extend Bernard’s arguments specifically to the realm of the novel, thereby situating fiction and literature within this overall direction of scientific advance. Where Bernard aims to extend scientific study into the realm of physiology and medicine, Zola desires to extend it even further, into the realm of “the passionate and intellectual life” (2).

What are the premises of the so-called experimental method? According to Bernard, as reported by Zola, the experimentalist is distinguished from the mere observer in that the latter “relates purely and simply the phenomena which he has under his eyes . . . He should be the photographer of phenomena, his observation should be an exact representation of nature” (7). The experimentalist, on the other hand, directly intervenes in, and modifies, these phenomena for specific heuristic purposes, to confirm or disprove an experimental idea or hypothesis (6–7). The experimental method or experimental reasoning is “based on doubt, for the experimentalist should have no preconceived idea, in the face of nature, and should always retain his liberty of thought” (3). Bernard, as quoted by Zola, distinguishes experimental reasoning from scholastic inquiry: “it is precisely the scholastic, who believes he has absolute certitude, who attains to no results . . . by his belief in an absolute principle he puts himself outside of nature . . . It is . . . the experimenter, who is always in doubt . . . who succeeds in mastering the phenomena which surround him, and in increasing his power over nature” (26). Hence this scientific method overturns and rejects all previous authority: “it recognizes no authority but that of facts . . . The experimental method is the scientific method which proclaims the liberty of thought. It not only throws off the philosophical and theological yoke, but it no longer admits scientific personal authority” (44). Zola accepts Bernard’s characterization of the stages of progress of the human mind, through “feeling, reason, and experiment”: at first, feeling, which dominated reason, created theology; then reason or philosophy, assuming the dominant role, engendered scholasticism; finally, experiment, or the study of natural phenomena, brought us to “the objective reality of things.” Hence the experimental method of science is the culmination of a historical development which is progressively rational and naturalistic (33–34).

The second and related major principle of science, according to Bernard, and Zola after him, is the belief in an “absolute determinism” in natural phenomena; in other words, there is no phenomenon, no occurrence in nature, which does not have a determining cause or complex of causes (3). An important aspect of this principle is that science shows us “the limit of our actual knowledge.” But such a recognition of what we can and cannot know is empowering: “as science humbles our pride, it strengthens our power” (22). A passage from Zola neatly sums up this part of his argument, whereby he situates literature within the general context of scientific advance:

the experimental novel is a consequence of the scientific evolution of the century; it continues and completes physiology, which itself leans for support on chemistry and medicine; it substitutes for the study of the abstract and the metaphysical man the study of the natural man, governed by physical or chemical laws, and modified by the influences of his surroundings; it is in one word the literature of our scientific age, as the classical and romantic literature corresponded to a scholastic and theological age. (23)

What does all of this mean in practice for the naturalistic novel? To begin with, Zola’s attitude represents an extreme reaction against Romanticism and all forms of mysticism and supernaturalism. Zola sees his own literary era as placing an exaggerated emphasis on form and as “rotten with lyricism” (48). He insists that the subject matter of the experimental novelist is rooted in actuality, in observation of human beings and their passions; he conducts a “real experiment” by altering the conditions and circumstances of the characters he creates, positing certain causes of their actions (10–11). Such an attitude is directly opposed to attitudes such as vitalism, which “consider life as a mysterious and supernatural agent, which acts arbitrarily, free from all determinism” (15). Anticipating Freud, Zola extends the principle of determinism from its application throughout natural phenomena to encompass human behavior. He extends the principle to literature, to the novel, which is a “general inquiry on nature and on man” (38), saying that “there is an absolute determinism for all human phenomena” (18). Zola sees this determinism, then, as both external and internal, as governing the external world and the psychology of man (17). Novelists should, he urges, “operate on the characters, the passions, on the human and social data, in the same way that the chemist and the physicist operate on inanimate beings, and as the physiologist operates on living beings. Determinism dominates everything.” As such, “purely imaginary novels” should be replaced by “novels of observation and experiment” (18).

If determinism dominates in both worlds, in nature and in the mind of man, the experimental novel must consider man in both social and psychological aspects. He suggests that “heredity has a great influence in the intellectual and passionate manifestations of man.” Considerable importance must also be attached to the “surroundings” (19). Hence, while he acknowledges that the novelist should continue the physiologist’s study of the “thoughts and passions,” he reminds us that these are not produced in a vacuum: “Man is not alone; he lives in society, in a social condition; and consequently, for us novelists, this social condition unceasingly modifies the phenomena. Indeed our great study is just there, in the reciprocal effect of society on the individual and the individual on society” (20). Zola sees the experimental novel as freeing this literary genre from “the atmosphere of lies and errors in which it is plunged” (42). The following is perhaps Zola’s most comprehensive definition of the program of the experimental novel:

this is what constitutes the experimental novel: to possess a knowledge of the mechanism of the phenomena inherent in man, to show the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under the influences of heredity and environment, such as physiology shall give them to us, and then finally to exhibit man living in social conditions produced by himself, which he modifies daily, and in the heart of which he himself experiences a continual transformation. (21)

Hence, Zola views literature as not merely the expression of an author’s mentality; the artist’s personality, he says, “is always subject to the higher law of truth and nature.” In fact, this personality is manifested only in the formal aspects of the novel rather than in its truth-value, which is independent of any such subjective basis (51). Zola explains that in the experimental novel all existing rhetorical elements are still allowed, since they do not impinge at all on the method of the novel (48).

Notes 1. Émile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, trans. Belle M. Sherman (New York: Haskell House, 1964), p. 1. Hereafter page citations are given in the text.

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18 Naturalism and Class

Jude Davies is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Winchester. He is author of several articles on Theodore Dreiser and edited Theodore Dreiser’s Political Writings. His previous books include Diana, A Cultural History: Gender, Race, Nation and the People’s Princess and, as coauthor, Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film and, as coeditor, Issues in Americanization and Culture.

• Published: 18 September 2012
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This article focuses on the relationship between naturalism and class. Naturalism played a significant role in forging a new middle-class sensibility. Dreiser, Norris, Crane, and even the overtly left-wing Sinclair and London helped shape and solidify this class, and ultimately enabled its self-recognition as the cultural and political mainstream, a position it retains. Typical naturalist texts helped define an aspirational middle class against existing elites and the industrial working class through their subject matter and mode of address. Looking upward and backward, naturalism catered to a literary taste that thought of itself as displacing the “genteel” realism associated with Boston and of which William Dean Howells became, somewhat unfairly, the epitome. Looking downward, the naturalist text differentiated its readers from its typical subjects precisely by virtue of their implied capacity for self-determination, in contrast to the Maggies, McTeagues, Carries, Hurstwoods, and others, whose narratives are determined by social and biological forces. Hence, though naturalism broke with picturesque, sentimental, and sensationalistic depictions of poverty, its embrace of environmental determinism tended to objectify its working-class and underclass subjects.

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ENGL 2130: American Literature

• Books & EBooks
• Library Resources
• Chapter 1: Late Romanticism (1855 -1870)
• Chapter 2: Realism (1865 -1890)
• Chapter 3: Naturalism (1890 - 1914)
• Chapter 4: Turn of the Twentieth Century and the Growth of Modernism (1893 - 1914)
• Chapter 5: Modernism (1914 - 1945)
• Chapter 6: American Literature Since 1945 (1945 - Present )
• Notable American Literature
• The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson By Mark Twain
• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• Open Educational Resources
• Literary Analysis This link opens in a new window
• APA Formatting This link opens in a new window
• MLA Formatting This link opens in a new window
• Copyright & Fair Use/Plagiarism

Notable Events in the United States between 1890 - 1914

1870 to 1914: Second Industrial Revolution

1890: The Battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, occurs in the last major battle between United States troops and Indians.

1892: telephone service / "Yellow wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1893: financial panic 

1895: Stephen Crane's   The Red Badge of Courage: an episode of the American Civil War 

1896: Plessy V. Ferguson

1898: Spanish-American War

1899: Kate Chopin's novel  The Awakening / Maple leaf Rag by Scott Joplin

1900: L. Frank Baum published  The Wizard of Oz  

1902: "To Build a Fire" by Jack London

1903: Jack London's  The Call of the Wild

1910: Jack London's  Burning Daylight 

Ebooks in Galileo

Chapter three: Naturalism (1890 - 1914)

Naturalism was a literary movement advanced in the aspects of realism in that they believed that social conditions, heredity, and the individual's environment had an impact on shaping human character. Naturalistic writers were often influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin.

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Additional Links & Resources

" Naturalism in American Literature"

Edith Wharton Society Provides biographical and chronological information and links to full text, novels, stories and poetry.

Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening  provides information on Chopin's life and her works.  The site includes links to full-texts of her works as well as links to criticism and primary sources.

KateChopin.org

The Kate Chopin International Society

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