Naturalism
Related: 1800s literature - Charles Darwin - French literature - realism in literature - reality - representation - Honoré de Balzac - Émile Zola
Naturalism was a French movement in literature that sought to replicate a scientifically (biology, heredity, environmental influences) accurate and believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. [Apr 2006]
Naturalistic works of literature often include uncouth or sordid subject matter. For example, Émile Zola's works had a frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark, harshness of life, including poverty, racism, prejudice, disease, prostitution, filth etc... These works were often criticized for being too blunt.
Naturalism (literature)
Naturalism is an outgrowth of Realism, a prominent literary movement in late 19th century France and elsewhere.
Naturalistic writers were influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin. They believed that one's heredity and surroundings decide one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (i.e. the environment or heredity) influencing these subjects' actions. They are both opposed to romanticism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter. For example, Emile Zola's works had a frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism.
Naturalists also adopted the technique of detailed description and an eye for the minute from their immediate predecessors, the Realists.
The main proponent of naturalism in fiction was Emile Zola, who wrote a treatise on the subject ("Le roman experimental") and employed the style in his many novels. Other French authors influenced by Zola were Guy de Maupassant, Joris Karl Huysmans, and the Goncourt brothers. Stephen Crane is probably the best-known naturalistic author to have written in English.
While literary naturalism is similar in definition to the philosophical and artistic movements of the same name, these were neither concurrent with nor extremely relevant to it. The music of the period, however, was influenced to some extent by it.
Slightly before 1900, symbolism and neo-romanticism began as reactions to naturalism and realism. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28literature%29 [Sept 2005]
As in film, naturalism is the general style, although the flexibility and amorphous quality of prose, as opposed to the concrete visual imagery of film, has allowed for a great number of other forms. In this context, naturalism is the outgrowth of Realism, a prominent literary movement in late 19th-century France and elsewhere.
Naturalistic writers were influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin. They believed that one's heredity and surroundings decide one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (i.e. the environment or heredity) influencing these subjects' actions. They are both opposed to romanticism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter. For example, Émile Zola's works had a frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, prejudice, disease, prostitution, filth, etc. They were often very pessimistic and frequently criticised for being too blunt. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28literature%29 [Dec 2006]
In the United States
In the United States, the genre is associated principally with writers such as Abraham Cahan, Ellen Glasgow, David Graham Phillips, Jack London, and most prominently Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser. The term naturalism operates primarily in counterdistinction to realism, particularly the mode of realism codified in the 1870s and 1880s, and associated with William Dean Howells and Henry James.
It is important to clarify the relationship between American literary naturalism, with which this entry is primarily concerned, from the genre also known as naturalism that flourished in France from the 1850s to the 1880s. French naturalism, as exemplified by Gustave Flaubert, and especially Emile Zola, can be regarded as a programmatic, well-defined and coherent theory of fiction that self-consciously rejected the notion of free will, and dedicated itself to the documentary and “scientific” exposition of human behaviour as being determined by, as Zola put it, “nerves and blood”.
Many of the American naturalists, especially Norris and London, were heavily influenced by Zola. They sought explanations for human behaviour in natural science, and were skeptical, at least, of organised religion and beliefs in human freewill. However, the Americans did not form a coherent literary movement, and their occasional critical and theoretical reflections do not present a uniform philosophy. Although Zola was a touchstone of contemporary debates over genre, Dreiser, perhaps the most important of the naturalist writers, regarded Balzac as a greater influence. Naturalism in American literature is therefore best understood historically in the generational manner outlined in the first paragraph above. In philosophical and generic terms, American naturalism must be defined rather more loosely, as a reaction against the realist fiction of the 1870s and 1880s, whose scope was limited to middle-class or “local color” topics, with taboos on sexuality and violence. The most significant elements of this reaction can be summarised as follows.
Naturalist fiction often concentrated on the non-Anglo, ethnically marked inhabitants of the growing American cities, many of them immigrants and most belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to the lower middle-class. The naturalists were not the first to concentrate on the industrialised American city, but they were significant in that they believed that the realist tools refined in the 1870s and 1880s were inadequate to represent it. Abraham Cahan, for example, sought both to represent and to address the Jewish community of New York's East Side, of which he was a member. The fiction of Theodore Dreiser, the son of first and second generation immigrants from Central Europe, features many German and Irish figures. Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, themselves from established middle-class Anglophone families also registered the ethnic mix of the metropolis, though for the most part via reductive and offensive stereotypes. In somewhat different ways, more marginal to the mainstream of naturalism, Ellen Glasgow's version of realism was specifically directed against the mythologising of the South, while the series of “problem novels” by David Graham Phillips, epitomised by the prostitution novel Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917), can be regarded as naturalistic by virtue of their underclass subject-matter.
Allied to this, naturalist writers were skeptical towards, or downright hostile to, the notions of bourgeois individualism that characterised realist novels about middle-class life. Most naturalists demonstrated a concern with the animal or the irrational motivations for human behaviour, sometimes manifested in connection with sexuality and violence. Here they differed strikingly from their French counterparts. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28literature%29 [Dec 2006]
Naturalism (art)
Naturalism in art refers to the depiction of realistic objects in a natural setting. The Realism movement of the 19th century advocated naturalism in reaction to the stylized and idealized depictions of subjects in Romanticism, but many painters have adopted a similar approach over the centuries. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28art%29 [Sept 2005]
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