American Naturalism
American Naturalism is a literary movement that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the harsh realities of life and human nature. It portrays characters as victims of their environment and heredity, often depicting them in desperate and sordid circumstances. Naturalist writers sought to present a more objective and scientific view of the world, emphasizing the influence of external forces on individuals.
7 Key excerpts on "American Naturalism"
eBook - ePub- Britannica Educational Publishing, Adam Augustyn(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Britannica Educational Publishing(Publisher)
...On Lincoln’s victory he was rewarded with a consulship at Venice (1861–65), which enabled him to marry. On his return to the U.S. he became assistant editor (1866–71), then editor (1871–81), of The Atlantic Monthly, in which he began publishing reviews and articles that interpreted American writers. He was a shrewd judge of his contemporaries. He immediately recognized the worth of Henry James, and he was the first to take Mark Twain seriously as an artist. Naturalism In literature and the visual arts, naturalism was a late 19th- and early 20th-century movement that was inspired by adaptation of the principles and methods of natural science, especially the Darwinian view of nature, to literature and art. In literature it extended the tradition of realism, aiming at an even more faithful, unselective representation of reality, a veritable “slice of life,” presented without moral judgment. Naturalism differed from realism in its assumption of scientific determinism, which led naturalistic authors to emphasize man’s accidental, physiological nature rather than his moral or rational qualities. Individual characters were seen as helpless products of heredity and environment, motivated by strong instinctual drives from within and harassed by social and economic pressures from without. As such, they had little will or responsibility for their fates, and the prognosis for their “cases” was pessimistic at the outset. Naturalism originated in France and had its direct theoretical basis in the critical approach of Hippolyte Taine, who announced in his introduction to Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863–64; History of English Literature) that “there is a cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, as there is for digestion, for muscular movement, for animal heat...
eBook - ePub- Jacob Stratman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...Chapter 4 Realism and Naturalism (1865–1910) REALISM I am making a slight change to the dates that the College Board (creators of the CLEP tests) states in its literature. Some scholars believe that realism as a literary movement began closer to 1870, but many more scholars point to the beginning of the Civil War as the beginning of American literary realism. Bullets, bloodshed, and brotherly bickering ushered in a reality that reacted strongly to the idyllic existence American romanticism painted. Then, after the battles ended, America began to grow and to expand its urban areas at the expense of its rural areas. The Industrial Revolution and increased European immigration caused a boom in urban populations. Post–Civil War America found itself in an existence of disillusionment and cynicism. Major technological breakthroughs also occurred at the end of the nineteenth century: the invention of the telephone, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and, of course, the introduction of the automobile. So literary realism is the label we give to those works that attempt to portray life as it actually is and not simply as the writer wishes (the latter being idealism). The brief historical information just mentioned is important because those incidents influenced writers who focused their plots and characters on the very immediate happenings of people in particular cultural moments. Realism is very interested in the mundane episodes of middle-class life; therefore, realist novels tended to lean towards social reform. Also, writers took it upon themselves to critically comment on America’s politics, economics, industry, and social issues, as well as gender, class, and race issues. Naturalism Literary naturalism is said to be a product of scientific determinism. Here’s a simple definition: You are controlled by your environment. There is no hope for you. Dreams come and dreams go. You are controlled by your gender, race, socioeconomic standing, and ethnicity...
eBook - ePubEdith Wharton
New Critical Essays
- Alfred Bendixen, Annette Zilversmit, Alfred Bendixen, Annette Zilversmit(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...American Naturalism in Its “Perfected” State: The Age of Innocence and An American Tragedy Donald Pizer Tulane University Naturalism has been a significant literary movement in America for almost a century. From the early work of Stephen Crane and Frank Norris to the recent novels of Robert Stone and William Kennedy, the subject matter and fictional form of naturalism have continually attracted writers of stature. 1 Of course, given the problematical philosophical base of naturalism, and given as well the often sensationalistic contents of a typical naturalistic novel, the movement has also been subject to intense attack. Indeed, one common assertion by those who would deny significance to naturalism in America is that the movement failed to survive its high point in the 1890s—this despite the powerful thread of naturalistic expression in most major American writers, including Hemingway and Faulkner, from the nineties to our own time. But naturalism, despite this critical hostility, refuses to go away, and thus, willy-nilly, has attracted a historiography over the last thirty or forty years—a historiography which contains several seemingly permanent and irrefutable assumptions about the movement. The difficulty presented by these assumptions, of course, is that they may serve to hinder rather than aid in the identification of works which can usefully be discussed as naturalistic. This screening role often played by the conventional historiography of American Naturalism is nowhere more evident than in the almost complete neglect of Edith Wharton in discussions of the movement. In an effort to locate Wharton’s major work more clearly and fully within American Naturalism, I will initially discuss those beliefs about the history of American Naturalism which have prevented a close examination of her most finished novel, The Age of Innocence, as naturalistic fiction...
eBook - ePubIn Hawthorne's Shadow
American Romance from Melville to Mailer
- Samuel Chase Coale(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- The University Press of Kentucky(Publisher)
...To Darwin, environment was all; all organisms were shaped by it, man as one among them. Man existed as the sum of all his desires and instincts, the somewhat pitiful victim of a universe operating by blind and iron forces. Man’s primitive yearnings for food and copulation propelled him through this field of forces into a perpetual void that he could never hope to comprehend. The naturalistic vision in literature demanded a more accurate vision of sexual instinct in man’s blind fumblings from womb to tomb, particularly if that could be observed in an urban slum, a railroad yard, or a meat-packing plant, or on a battlefront. The “smiling aspects” of William Dean Howells’s literary realism, with its attention to social and historical detail, dissolved in the face of more gruesome observations. With the appearance of Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Frederic on the literary scene, Howells’s smiling surface began to break up. As George Johnson suggests, these writers were in the process of “freeing the novel from the comprehensive, realistic rendering of life in society without losing solidity and density, while regaining the symbolic or mythic significance of the older tradition of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.” 10 As Norris, Crane, and Frederic dug deeper below the cracked surface of social convention, they began to uncover wider social patterns, veritable new mythologies revealed in the mental processes of the mind. As a result, these writers began to abandon the objective techniques of the realist, the neoclassicist concern with the Standard Type draped in General Decorum, and opened up what they considered to be new symbolic patterns of experience. This focus upon primitive forces not only revealed a loss of confidence in the outward appearance of Western civilization but also uncovered new psychological and mythic patterns in those very forces that pointed toward new truths, eternally present beneath the flux of time and space...
eBook - ePub- Frederic Neyrat(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Broadly speaking, it defines writers and painters who reject any idealization of social life – a rejection that could please any materialist thinker. For these artists (like French novelist Emile Zola (1840–1902)), art has to be realistic, objective, and above anything quasi-scientific. For a naturalist artist, the environment – be it natural (like heredity) or social (like social conditions, class belonging) – shapes the human character and determines human beings’ actions, their present and their future. In their natural or social environment, the individuals must struggle if they want to survive and meet their needs. But this struggle does not reveal a free will, just a necessity to adjust to conditions in a world deprived from any sort of spiritual interventions. In a way, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild perfectly corresponds to the definition of naturalism. 15 The novel is about the reversion of a domesticated dog to a wild beast: Buck is kidnapped in his home, in California, and taken to the primitive Yukon (in Canada). When in California, he is like a “sated aristocrat” 16. But in the frigid Yukon, he begins the life of a sled dog. In this almost unlivable, unbearable world, it seems that there is only one rule: “Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten” (110). London’s novel deals a lot with the question of survival: Buck must learn how to become the “dominant primordial beast” (That is the title of chapter 3), and the club of the man in the red sweater (chapter 1) taught Buck “the primitive law” (51), that is to say the law of the strongest. To survive, Buck learns how to “adjust himself to changing conditions” (62), he learns how to “accommodate himself to the new mode of life” (63)...
eBook - ePubContemporary American Philosophy
Personal Statements Volume II
- Adams, George P and Montague, Wm Pepperell(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...REALISM, NATURALISM, AND HUMANISM By ROY WOOD SELLARS Born 1880; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. REALISM, NATURALISM, AND HUMANISM I B IOGRAPHICAL I HAVE been given to understand that the essays included in this volume are supposed to present an exposition of the writer’s philosophical creed—if he has a definite one—and, at the same time, to indicate some of the influences which have affected his thought. There is, I presume, no assumption that his thought is a mere effect of these influences, but rather the quite justified belief that it can be better understood in relation to them. Because it will be easiest to consider first the influences which I can note in my life I shall begin in this way and so preface the systematic part of my essay with some remarks upon the development of my thought. I was brought up in a small village in an almost pioneer community in north-eastern Michigan. Actually I was born in Canada of typically mixed stock, in which I can trace Scot, English, Welsh, Irish, and German ingredients, the Scot predominating. My father, who was a physician, was a man whom I have always regarded as of exceptional natural ability. He had struggled for an education, becoming a country school teacher in Canada at an early age, in a period when schools were attended by pretty rough boys and girls often older than the teacher. His stories of his life undoubtedly influenced my attitude to many things. Forced to give up school work by bad health after he had made a success, he attended the University of Michigan while a small family, myself the youngest, was dependent upon him. Economic pressure then forced him to find a place where practice would quickly come, and the new country of the North was chosen. It was here that my formative years were spent, for I did not leave the little village until I was seventeen. Here my companions were farmers’ boys, and my chief pleasure was reading what books I could lay my hands on and roaming through the woods...
eBook - ePub- Christopher Innes, Christopher Innes(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Naturalism alone corresponds to our social needs; it alone has deep roots in the spirit of our times; and it alone can provide a living, durable formula for our art, because this formula will express the nature of our contemporary intelligence. There may be fashions and passing fantasies that exist outside naturalism but they will not survive for long. I say again, naturalism is the expression of our century and it will not die until a new upheaval transforms our democratic world. Only one thing is needed now: men of genius who can fix the naturalistic formula. Balzac has done it for the novel and the novel is established. When will our Corneilles, Molières and Racines appear to establish our new theatre? […] Take our present environment, then, and try to make men live in it: you will write great works. It will undoubtedly call for some effort; it means sifting out of the confusion of life the simple formula of naturalism. Therein lies the difficulty: to do great things with the subjects and characters that our eyes, accustomed to the spectacle of the daily round, have come to see as small. I am aware that it is more convenient to present a marionette to the public and name it Charlemagne and puff it up with such tirades that the public believes it is watching a colossus; it is more convenient than taking a bourgeois of our time, a grotesque, unsightly man, and drawing sublime poetry out of him, making him, for example, Père Goriot, the father who gives his guts for his daughters, a figure so gigantic with truth and love that no other literature can offer his equal. […] The future is with naturalism. The formula will be found; it will be proved that there is more poetry in the little apartment of a bourgeois than in all the empty, worm-eaten palaces of history; in the end we will see that everything meets in the real: lovely fantasies that are free of capriciousness and whimsy, and idylls, and comedies, and dramas...
