American Naturalism and Asiatic Racial Form: Frank Norris's The Octopus and Moran of the “Lady Letty”

Abstract

ABSTRACT American literary naturalism is well known for its formal engagement with determination and abstraction and its thematic preoccupation with Anglo-Saxon degeneration. Yet the central importance of the U.S.-Asian border to the literature's elaboration of the imperial contradictions of monopoly finance capitalism has been largely overlooked. Taking up the question of U.S. anti-Asian anticapitalism, a political movement with which American naturalism was historically coincident, this essay explores the powerful early twentieth-century consensus that permitted the conflation of trust-busting and coolie-fighting.