Download or read book Form and History in American Literary Naturalism written by June Howard and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the novels of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and other writers, June Howard presents a study of American literary naturalism as a genre. Naturalism, she states, is a way of imagining the world and the relation of the self to the world, a way of making sense -- and making narrative -- out of the comforts and discomforts of its historical moment. Howard believes that naturalism accomodates the sense of perilousness, uncertainty, and disorder that many Americans felt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She argues for a redefinition of the form which allows it to be seen as an immanent ideology responding to a specific historical situation. Working both from accepted definitions of naturalism and from close analysis of the literary texts themselves, Howard consructs a new description of the genre in terms of its thematic antinomies, patterns of characterization, and narrative strategies. She defines a range of historical and cultural reference for the ideas and images of American naturalism and suggests that the form has affinities with such contemporary ideologies as political progressivism and criminal anthropology. In the process, she demonstrates that genre criticism and historical analysis can be combined to create a powerful method for writing literary history. Throughout Howard's study, the concept of genre is used not as a prescriptive straitjacket but as a category allowing the perception of significant similarities and differences among literary works and the coordination of textual analysis with the history of literary and social forces. For Howard, naturalism is a dynamic solution to the problem of generating narrative from the particular historical and cultural materials available to the authors. Originally published in 1985. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Download or read book The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism written by Donald Pizer and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his first book devoted exclusively to naturalism, Donald Pizer brings together thirteen essays and four reviews written over a thirty-year period that in their entirety constitute a full-scale interpretation of the basic character and historical shape of naturalism in America. The essays fall into three groups. Some deal with the full range of American naturalism, from the 1590s to the late twentieth century, and some are confined either to the 1890s or to the twentieth century. In addition to the essays, an introduction in which Pizer recounts the development of his interest in American naturalism, reviews of recent studies of naturalism, and a selected bibliography contribute to an understanding of Pizer's interpretation of the movement. One of the recurrent themes in the essays is that the interpretation of American naturalism has been hindered by the common view that the movement is characterized by a commitment to Emile Zola's deterministic beliefs and that naturalistic novels are thus inevitably crude and simplistic both in theme and method. Rather than accept this notion, Pizer insists that naturalistic novels be read closely not for their success or failure in rendering obvious deterministic beliefs but rather for what actually does occur within the dynamic play of theme and form within the work. Adopting this method, Pizer finds that naturalistic fiction often reveals a complex and suggestive mix of older humanistic faiths and more recent doubts about human volition, and that it renders this vital thematic ambivalence in increasingly sophisticated forms as the movement matures. In addition, Pizer demonstrates that American naturalism cannot be viewed monolithically as a school with a common body of belief and value. Rather, each generation of American naturalists, as well as major figures within each generation, has responded to threads within the naturalistic impulse in strikingly distinctive ways. And it is indeed this absence of a rigid doctrinal core and the openness of the movement to individual variation that are responsible for the remarkable vitality and longevity of the movement. Because the essays have their origin in efforts to describe the general characteristics of American naturalism rather than in a desire to cover the field fully, some authors and works are discussed several times (though from different angles) and some referred to only briefly or notat all. But the essays as a collection are "complete" in the sense that they comprise an interpretation of American naturalism both in its various phases and as a whole. Those authors whose works receive substantial discussion include Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James T. Farrell, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and William Kennedy. Of special interest is Pizer's essay on Ironweed, which appears here for the first time.
Download or read book Twentieth century American Literary Naturalism written by Donald Pizer and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pizer explores six novels to define naturalism and explain its tenacious hold throughout the twentieth century on the American creative imagination.
Download or read book American Literary Naturalism a Divided Stream written by Charles Child Walcutt and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1956 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Literary Naturalism, a Divided Stream was first published in 1956. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The literary concept of naturalism perpetually contradicts itself, oscillating between the transcendental affirmation of human freedom and the demonstration of its nonexistence. In this tension it gropes for forms that will satisfy both demands. These contradictions, and this divided stream, Mr. Walcutt shows, represent the central intellectual and social problem of the modern world, where the confusions between materialism and religion are ubiquitous. In tracing the development of naturalism in the novel, the author provides a background with chapters on naturalistic theory and the theory and practice of Emile Zola. He then traces the shifts in form through the worlds of Harold Frederic, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, Winston Churchill, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passes. College English commented: "This is a book that will clarify some of the confusion that teachers and students face when they discover that naturalistic novels do not always follow naturalistic theory." Writing in Prairie Schooner, Ihab Hassan pointed out: "In speculating on the origins of naturalism, in perceiving the inner contradictions of its spirit and the tensions of its form, and in following its full and vital sweep as it allies itself now with impressionism, now with expressionism, Professor Walcutt manages to throw new light on a major movement in American letters."
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism written by Keith Newlin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, naturalism, a genre that typically depicts human beings as the product of biological and environmental forces over which they have little control, was supplanted by modernism, a genre in which writers experimented with innovations in form and content. In the last decade, the movement is again attracting spirited scholarly debate. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism takes stock of the best new research in the field through collecting twenty-eight original essays drawing upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies. The contributors offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of writers from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London to Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, Joyce Carol Oates, and Cormac McCarthy. One set of essays focus on the genre itself, exploring the historical contexts that gave birth to it, the problem of definition, its interconnections with other genres, the scientific and philosophical ideas that motivate naturalist authors, and the continuing presence of naturalism in twenty-first century fiction. Others examine the tensions within the genre-the role of women and African-American writers, depictions of sexuality, the problem of race, and the critique of commodity culture and class. A final set of essays looks beyond the works to consider the role of the marketplace in the development of naturalism, the popular and critical response to the works, and the influence of naturalism in the other arts.
Download or read book Figures of the World written by Christopher Laing Hill and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill follows naturalism’s emergence in France and circulation around the world from North and South America to East Asia. His analysis shows that transnational literary studies must operate on multiple scales, combine distant reading with close analysis, and investigate how literary forms develop on the move. The book begins by tracing the history of naturalist fiction from the 1860s into the twentieth century and the reasons it spread around the world. Hill explores the development of three naturalist figures—the degenerate body, the self-liberated woman, and the social milieu—through close readings of fiction from France, Japan, and the United States. Rather than genealogies of European influence or the domination of cultural “peripheries” by the center, novels by Émile Zola, Tayama Katai, Frank Norris, and other writers reveal conspicuous departures from metropolitan models as writers revised naturalist methods to address new social conditions. Hill offers a new approach to studying culture on a large scale for readers interested in literature, the arts, and the history of ideas.
Download or read book Naturalism in American Fiction written by John J. Conder and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this closely reasoned study, John J. Conder has created a new and more vital understanding of naturalism in American literature. Moving from the Hobbesian dilemma between causation and free will down through Bergson's concept of dual selves, Conder defines a view of determinism so rich in possibilities that it can serve as the inspiration of literary works of astonishing variety and unite them in a single, though developing, naturalistic tradition in American letters. At the heart of this book, beyond its philosophic discussion, is Conder's reading of key works in the naturalistic canon, beginning with Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" and "The Blue Hotel." The special character of determinism in Crane is, Conder holds, the source of his complexity and striking originality. He finds a stricter determinism in Norris's McTeague. In Dreiser, however, the naturalistic tradition develops toward a fusion of determinism and freedom in a single work, and this fusion in a different guise operates in Dos Passos's view of self in Manhattan Transfer. With Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath the uniting of determinism and freedom finds its fullest realization in the concept of dual selves, one determined, one free. In Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! the concept of the dual self appears in its most complex form. The developments in the work of Steinbeck and Faulkner, Conder believes, bring the classic phase of American literary naturalism to a close. Naturalism in American Fiction illuminates a group of major literary works and revives a theoretic consideration of naturalism. It thus makes a fundamental contribution to American studies.
Download or read book American Literary Naturalism and Its Twentieth century Transformations written by Paul Civello and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study examines American literary naturalism as a narrative form and the ways in which it has been reworked in modern and postmodern texts. Departing from the work of such widely diverse theorists as Charles Child Walcutt, Donald Pizer, and Walter Benn Michaels, Paul Civello views naturalism not as a distinctly turn-of-the-century literary phenomenon but as a form of narrative that continued to manifest itself in later literary movements." "In tracing the evolution of this movement, Civello concentrates on three authors from distinctly different periods of American literature: Frank Norris, representative of nineteenth-century literary naturalism; Ernest Hemingway, a central figure in modernism; and Don DeLillo, a writer in the postmodern tradition. Beginning with a discussion of the Darwinian roots of naturalism, Civello reads two representative texts by each of the three authors in light of scientific and philosophical discourse of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism written by Keith Newlin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, naturalism, a genre that typically depicts human beings as the product of biological and environmental forces over which they have little control, was supplanted by modernism, a genre in which writers experimented with innovations in form and content. In the last decade, the movement is again attracting spirited scholarly debate. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism takes stock of the best new research in the field through collecting twenty-eight original essays drawing upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies. The contributors offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of writers from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London to Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, Joyce Carol Oates, and Cormac McCarthy. One set of essays focus on the genre itself, exploring the historical contexts that gave birth to it, the problem of definition, its interconnections with other genres, the scientific and philosophical ideas that motivate naturalist authors, and the continuing presence of naturalism in twenty-first century fiction. Others examine the tensions within the genre-the role of women and African-American writers, depictions of sexuality, the problem of race, and the critique of commodity culture and class. A final set of essays looks beyond the works to consider the role of the marketplace in the development of naturalism, the popular and critical response to the works, and the influence of naturalism in the other arts.
Download or read book Frank Norris and American Naturalism written by Donald Pizer and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Frank Norris and American Naturalism' brings together in one volume Donald Pizer's essays on the writings of Frank Norris. The essays as a whole seek to demonstrate both the coherence of Norris's thought and his contribution toward the establishment of a distinctive form of naturalism in America.
Download or read book Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth century American Literature written by Donald Pizer and published by Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1966 edition of this book has become a standard work. In this new, revised edition, Pizer has dropped three chapters and has refined and extended the work by adding six: "American Literary Naturalism: An Approach Through Form," "American Literary Naturalism: The Example of Dreiser," "The Problem of Philosophy in the Naturalistic Novel," "Hamlin Garland's 1891 Main-Travelled Roads: Local Color as Art," "Jack London: The Problem of Form," and "Dreiser's 'Nigger Jeff' The Development of an Aesthetic." The book contains definitions of realism and naturalism based on representative novels of the period ranging from Howells' Rise of Silas Lapham to Crane's Red Badge of Courage; analyses of the literary criticism of the age, stressing that of Howells, Garland, and Norris; and close readings of specific works by major figures of the period.
Download or read book The Vast and Terrible Drama written by Eric Carl Link and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A broad treatment of the cultural, social, political, and literary under-pinnings of an entire period and movement in American letters The Vast and Terrible Drama is a critical study of the context in which authors such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London created their most significant work. In 1896 Frank Norris wrote: "Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary . . . and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama." There could be "no teacup tragedies here." This volume broadens our understanding of literary naturalism as a response to these and other aesthetic concerns of the 19th century. Themes addressed include the traditionally close connection between French naturalism and American literary naturalism; relationships between the movement and the romance tradition in American literature, as well as with utopian fictions of the 19th century; narrative strategies employed by the key writers; the dominant naturalist theme of determinism; and textual readings that provide broad examples of the role of the reader. By examining these and other aspects of American literary naturalism, Link counters a century of criticism that has perhaps viewed literary naturalism too narrowly, as a subset of realism, bound by the conventions of realistic narration.
Download or read book American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity written by Melanie V. Dawson and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2018-08-10 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The years between 1880 and 1930 are usually seen as a time in which American writers departed from values and traditions of the Victorian era in wholly new works of modernist literature, with the turn of the century typically used as a dividing line between the old and the new. Challenging this periodization, contributors argue that this entire time span should instead be studied as a coherent and complex literary field. The essays in this volume show that these were years of experimentation, negotiation of boundaries, and hybridity—resulting in a true literature of transition. Contributors offer new readings of authors including Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser in light of their ties to both the nineteenth-century past and the emerging modernity of the twentieth century. Emphasizing the diversity of the literature of this time, contributors also examine poetry written by and for Native American students in a Westernized boarding school, the changing attitudes of authors toward marriage, turn-of-the-century feminism, dime novels, anthologies edited by late-nineteenth-century female literary historians, and fiction of the Harlem Renaissance. Calling for readers to look both forward and backward at the cultural contexts of these works and to be mindful of the elastic categories of this era, these essays demonstrate the plurality and the tensions characteristic of American literature during the century’s long turn. Contributors: Dale M. Bauer | Donna M. Campbell | Melanie Dawson | Myrto Drizou | Meredith Goldsmith | Karin Hooks | John G. Nichols | Kristen Renzi | Cristina Stanciu
Download or read book The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism written by Karin M. Danielsson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism responds to a need to expand and refine the connections among nonhuman studies and American literary naturalism and to productively expand the scholarly discourse surrounding this vital movement in American literary history. This collection focuses on that which becomes visible when the human subject is skirted, or moved off-center: in other words, the representation of nonhuman animals and other vital or inert species, things, entities, cityscapes and seascapes, that play an important part in American literary naturalism. Informed by animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, new materialism, and other recent theoretical perspectives, the essays in this collection discuss early naturalist texts as well as more recent naturalistic-oriented authors.
Download or read book The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism written by Christophe Den Tandt and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dynamic reappraisal of American literary naturalism, Christophe Den Tandt connects late nineteenth-century fiction to its romantic, urban gothic roots and to recent discussions of the sublime in postmodern theory. Den Tandt focuses on aspects of naturalist novels -- their use of hyperbole and hysteria, of the grotesque and the abject, of uncanniness and mesmerism -- that have often been left in the periphery of naturalist discourse. He argues that realistic strategies of literary representation can never succeed in depicting the urban environment since the logic of the city rests on a network of hidden relations. Naturalist texts try to resolve this dilemma by opposing sublime components and realistic documentary elements.
Download or read book American Literary Naturalism written by Yoshinobu Hakutani and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Literary Naturalism written by Donald Pizer and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book collects Pizer’s late career essays on various writers and subjects related to American naturalism. Of these, two seek to describe the movement as a whole, six are on specific writers or works (with an emphasis on Theodore Dreiser), and two reprint informative interviews by Pizer on the subject. The essays reflect Pizer’s mature engagement of the subject he has spent a lifetime exploring.
