Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of
American Naturalism. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
'"A Strange and Ecstatic Pleasure': The Voyeurism of the Naturalist's Gaze in Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute and McTeague." Studies in
American Naturalism 6.1 (2011): 49-68.
Donald Pizer's lively and succinct
American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather explores a riddle that has long dogged scholars of American literary naturalism: how could writers whose reformist politics were otherwise so liberal indulge in the crude semantics of antisemitism?
(1.) I'm not an expert on public policy, but the extent to which public policy regarding land use has often held hands with
American naturalism and Christian ideas of predestination seems pretty evident.
American Naturalism and the Jews opens exciting avenues for such work.
The first two chapters of the book present an insightful analysis of the historical context that set the stage for the later development of
American naturalism. This is followed by a chapter on Santayana, whose early work at Harvard provided much of the impetus for the revival of Greek philosophy, and six chapters on the subsequent development of naturalistic philosophy at Columbia.
American naturalism, as exemplified by such writers as Crane, Norris, and Dreiser, involved a middle class narrator acting as what James R.
While he notes that studies of literary naturalism have in the past almost entirely neglected Wharton's novels, largely because she was not male and did not often write about the lower classes, he affirms those who have initiated the "rediscovery" of Wharton as a naturalist novelist ("
American Naturalism" 127).(3) This rediscovery, in the case of The House of Mirth, has been based on abundant textual evidence suggesting that Wharton, fully conversant with the tenets and tropes of naturalistic philosophy and fiction, consciously depicted Lily Bart as a victim of her social environment.
Playwright Sam Shepard returns to the New York stage with the Manhattan Theater Club's world premiere of "Eyes for Consuela," an uneasy blend of
American naturalism and south-of-the-border mysticism.
WHEN WALTER BENN MICHAELS'S The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism appeared in 1987, the study of
American naturalism underwent a fundamental change.