Naturalist Fiction

Abstract

Famously dismissed by Malcolm Cowley and other critics as little more than “pessimistic determinism,” American literary naturalism might more fully be described as an attempt to incorporate the revolutionary scientific ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into an American literary tradition already heavily invested in questions of free will and individualism. At its center, naturalist fiction is concerned with understanding the limits placed upon an individual by forces beyond his or her control. While generally viewed as the culmination of the realist turn in American art and literature that began after the US Civil War, the naturalist movement, with its incorporation of scientific discourse, its exploration of individual consciousness, its experimentation with form and technique, and its attention to issues of racial and gendered difference, should also be seen as laying the groundwork for questions of subjectivity, epistemology, and ethics so crucial to modernism and postmodernism. Always engaged with contemporaneous social, political, and intellectual issues, naturalism as a fictional mode continued to evolve in response to, and along with, the myriad cultural changes of the twentieth century.